A Few Days in the Country (11 page)

Julia was terrifically interested when she heard. Looking as if she'd won a bet with herself, she started to laugh. ‘Pregnant! Silly little thing! Why didn't she use something?'

Elsie cried and carried on when she heard the news, saying that the girl was capable of doing something desperate. ‘Suicide, even!' Elsie cried. ‘You didn't know her!'

Suicide! Some people had morbid minds.

No small failure ever changed Julia. She continued to lead the loveliest life. On Sundays, when they were free for a few hours, she and Ralph took the boys out sailing, or to watch polo matches. Ralph opened more branch offices. There were exhibitions of modern painting and pottery to arrange on behalf of Julia's pet charity, and talk of another royal visit to Australia. Edward Driscoll mysteriously vanished, and none of the disciples sighted Anne-Marie again. The world situation got worse, and then better, and then worse again. No one more remarkable than Julia ever appeared. No one took up the gauntlet she had thrown in the face of the universe.

7

The Beautiful Climate

The Shaws went down to the cottage on Scotland Island every weekend for two years. Hector Shaw bought the place from some hotelkeeper he knew, never having so much as hinted at his intention till the contract was signed. Then he announced to his wife and daughter the name of a certain house, his ownership of it, its location, and the fact that they would all go down every Friday night to put it in order.

It was about an hour's drive from Sydney. At the Church Point wharf they would park the car, lock it up, and wait for the ferry to take them across to the island.

Five or six families made a living locally, tinkering with boats and fishing, but most of the houses round about were weekenders, like the Shaws' place. Usually these cottages were sold complete with a strip of waterfront and a jetty. In the Shaws' case the jetty was a long spindly affair of grey wooden palings on rickety stilts, with a perpendicular ladder that had to be climbed getting in and out of the boat. Some of the others were handsome constructions equipped with special flags and lights to summon the ferryman when it was time to return to civilisation.

As Mr Shaw had foretold, they were constantly occupied putting the house in order, but now and then he would buy some green prawns, collect the lines from the spare-bedroom cupboard, and take his family into the middle of the bay to fish. While he made it obligatory to assume that this was a treat, he performed every action with his customary air of silent, smouldering violence, as if to punish misdemeanours, alarming his wife and daughter greatly.

Mrs Shaw put on her big straw sunhat, tied it solemnly under her chin, and went behind him down the seventy rough rock steps from the house. She said nothing. The glare from the water gave her a migraine. Since a day years before when she was a schoolgirl learning to swim and had almost drowned, she had had a horror of deep water. Her husband knew it. He was a difficult man, for what reason no one had been able to discover, least of all Hector Shaw himself.

Del followed her mother down the steep bushy track, not speaking, her nerves raw, her soundless protests battering the air about her. She did not
want
to go; nor, of course, could she stay when her absence would be used against her mother.

They were not free. Either the hostage, or the one over whom a hostage was held, they seemed destined to play forever if they meant to preserve the peace. And peace had to be preserved. Everything had always been subordinated to this task. As a child, Del had been taught that happiness was nothing but the absence of unpleasantness. For all she knew, it was true. Unpleasantness, she knew, could be extremely disagreeable. She knew that what was irrational had to be borne, and she knew she and her mother longed for peace and quiet—since she had been told so often. But still she did not want to go.

Yet that they should not accompany her father was unthinkable. That they should all three be clamped together was, in a way, the whole purpose of the thing. Though Del and her mother were aware that he might one day sink the boat deliberately. It wasn't
likely
, because he was terrified of death, whereas his wife would welcome oblivion, and his daughter had a stony capacity for endurance (so regarding death, at least, they had the upper hand); but it was
possible
. Just as he might crash the car some day on purpose if all three were secure together in it.

‘Why do we
do
it?' Del asked her mother relentlessly. ‘You'd think we were mental defectives, the way we troop behind him and do what we're told just to save any trouble. And it never does. Nothing we do makes sure of anything. When I go out to work every day it's as if I'm out on parole. You'd think we were hypnotised.'

Her mother sighed and failed to look up, and continued to butter the scones.

‘
You're
his wife, so maybe you think you have to do it, but I don't. I'm eighteen.'

However, till quite recently she had been a good deal younger, and most accustomed to being used in the cause of peace. Now her acquiescence gnawed at her and baffled her; but, though she made isolated stands, in essence she always did submit. Her few rebellions were carefully gauged to remain within the permitted limits, the complaints of a prisoner of war to the camp commandant.

This constant nagging from the girl exhausted Mrs Shaw. Exasperation penetrated even her alarming headaches. She asked desperately, ‘What would you do if you
didn't
come? You're too nervous to stay in town by yourself. And if you did, what would you do?'

‘
Here
. I have to come
here
, but why do we have to go in the boat?' On a lower note, Del muttered, ‘I wish I worked at the kindergarten seven days a week; I dread the nights and weekends.'

She could
think
a thing like that, but never say it without a deep feeling of shame. Something about her situation made her feel not only, passively, abused, but actively, surprisingly, guilty.

All Del's analysis notwithstanding, the fishing expeditions took place whenever the man of the family signified his desire for some sport. Stationed in the dead centre of the glittering bay, within sight of their empty house, they sat in the open boat, grasping cork rollers, feeling minute and interesting tugs on their lines from time to time, losing bait, and catching three-inch fish.

Low hills densely covered with thin gums and scrub sloped down on all sides to the rocky shore. They formed silent walls of a dark subdued green, without shine. Occasional painted roofs showed through. Small boats puttered past and disappeared.

As the inevitable pain began to saturate Mrs Shaw's head, she turned gradually paler. She leaned against the side of the boat with her eyes closed, her hands obediently clasping the fishing line she had been told to hold.

The dazzle of the heavy summer sun sucked up colour till the scene looked black. Her light skin began to burn. The straw sunhat was like a neat little oven in which her hair, her head, and all its contents were being cooked.

Without expression, head lowered, Del looked at her hands, fingernails, legs, at the composition of the cork round which her line was rolled. She glanced sometimes at her mother, and sometimes, by accident, she caught sight of her father's bare feet or his arm flinging out a newly baited line, or angling some small silver fish off the hook and throwing it back, and her eyes sheered away.

The wooden interior of the boat was dry and burning. The three fishers were seared, beaten down by the sun. The bait smelled. The water lapped and twinkled blackly but could not be approached: sharks abounded in the bay.

The cottage was fairly dilapidated. The walls needed painting inside and out, and parts of the veranda at the front and both sides had to be re-floored. In the bedrooms, sitting room, and kitchen, most of the furniture was old and crudely made. They burned the worst of it, replacing it with new stuff, and what was worth salvaging Mrs Shaw and Del gradually scrubbed, sanded and painted.

Mr Shaw did carpentering jobs, and cleared the ground nearby of some of the thick growth of eucalyptus gums that had made the rooms dark. He installed a generator, too, so that they could have electric light instead of relying on kerosene lamps at night.

Now and then his mood changed inexplicably, for reasons so unconnected with events that no study and perpetuation of these external circumstances could ensure a similar result again. Nevertheless, knowing it could not last, believing it might, Mrs Shaw and Del responded shyly, then enthusiastically, but always with respect and circumspection, as if a friendly lion had come to tea.

These hours or days of amazing good humour were passed, as it were, a few feet off the ground, in an atmosphere of slightly hysterical gaiety. They sang, pumping water to the tanks; they joked at either end of the saw, cutting logs for winter fires; they ran, jumped, slithered, and laughed till they had to lean against the trees for support. They reminded each other of all the incidents of other days like these, at other times when his nature was in eclipse.

‘We'll fix up a nice shark-proof pool for ourselves,' he said. ‘We own the water frontage. It's crazy not to be able to cool off when we come down. If you can't have a dip here, surrounded by water, what's the sense? We'd be better to stay home and go to the beach, in this weather.'

‘Three cheers!' Del said. ‘When do we start?'

The seasons changed. When the nights grew colder, Mr Shaw built huge log fires in the sitting room. If his mood permitted, these fires were the cause of his being teased, and he liked very much to be teased.

Charmed by his own idiosyncrasy, he would pile the wood higher and higher, so that the walls and ceiling shone and flickered with the flames, and the whole room crackled like a furnace on the point of explosion. Faces scorching, they would rush to throw open the windows, then they'd fling open the doors, dying for air. Soon the chairs nearest the fire would begin to smoke and then everyone would leap outside to the dark veranda, crimson and choking. Mr Shaw laughed and coughed till he was hoarse, wiping his eyes.

For the first few months, visitors were nonexistent, but one night on the ferry the Shaws struck up a friendship with some people called the Rivers, who had just bought a cottage next door. They came round one Saturday night to play poker and have supper, and in no time weekly visits to each other's house were established as routine. Grace and Jack Rivers were relaxed and entertaining company. Their easy good nature fascinated the Shaws, who looked forward to these meetings seriously, as if the Rivers were a sort of rest cure ordered by a specialist, from which they might pick up some health.

‘It was too good to last,' Mrs Shaw said later. ‘People are so funny.'

The Rivers' son, Martin, completed his army training and went down to stay on the island for a month before returning to his marine-engineering course at a technical college in town. He and Del met sometimes and talked, but she had not gone sailing with him when he asked her, nor was she tempted to walk across the island to visit his friends who had a pool.

‘Why not?' he asked.

‘Oh, well…' She looked down at the dusty garden from the veranda where they stood. ‘I have to paint those chairs this afternoon.'

‘
Have
to?' Martin had a young, open, slightly freckled face. Del looked at him, feeling old, not knowing how to explain how complicated it would be to extricate herself from the house, and her mother and father. He would never understand the drama, the astonishment, that would accompany her statement to them. Even if, eventually, they said, ‘Go, go!' recovering from their shock, her own joylessness and fatigue were so clear to her in anticipation that she had no desire even to test her strength in the matter.

But one Saturday night, over a game of cards, Martin asked her parents if he might take her the next night to a party across the bay. A friend of his, Noel Stacey, had a birthday to celebrate.

Del looked at him with mild surprise. He had asked her. She had refused.

Her father laughed a lot at this request as though it were very funny, or silly, or misguided, or simply impossible. It turned out that it
was
impossible. They had to get back to Sydney early on Sunday night.

If they
did
have to, it was unprecedented, and news to Del. But she looked at her father with no surprise at all.

Martin said, ‘Well, it'll be a good party,' and gave her a quizzical grin. But his mother turned quite pink, and his father cleared his throat gruffly several times. The game broke up a little earlier than usual, and, as it happened, was the last one they ever had together.

Not knowing that it was to be so, however, Mrs Shaw was pleased that the matter had been dealt with so kindly and firmly. ‘What a funny boy!' she said later, a little coyly, to Del.

‘Is he?' she said indifferently.

‘One of the new generation,' said Mr Shaw, shaking his head, and eyeing her with caution.

‘Oh?' she said, and went to bed.

‘She didn't really want to go to that party at all,' her mother said.

‘No, but we won't have him over again, do you think? He's got his own friends. Let him stick to them. There's no need for this. These fellows who've been in army camps—I know what they're like.'

‘She hardly looked at him. She didn't care.' Mrs Shaw collected the six pale-blue cups, saucers, and plates on the wooden tray, together with the remnants of supper.

With his back to the fire, hands clasped behind him, Mr Shaw brooded. ‘He had a nerve, though, when you come to think of it. I mean—he's a complete stranger.'

Mrs Shaw sighed anxiously, and her eyes went from one side of the room to the other. ‘I'm sure she didn't like him. She doesn't take much interest in boys. You're the only one.'

Mr Shaw laughed reluctantly, looking down at his shoes.