A Few Days in the Country (12 page)

As more and more of the property was duly painted and repaired, the Shaws tended to stop work earlier in the day, perhaps with the unspoken intention of making the remaining tasks last longer. Anyway, the pressure was off, and Mrs Shaw knitted sweaters, and her husband played patience, while Del was invariably glued to some book or other.

No one in the district could remember the original owner-builder of their cottage, or what he was like. But whether it was this first man, or a later owner, someone had left a surprisingly good library behind. It seemed likely that the builder had lived and died there, and that his collection had simply been passed on with the property from buyer to buyer, over the years.

Books seemed peculiarly irrelevant on this remote hillside smelling of damp earth and wood smoke and gums. The island had an ancient, prehistoric, undiscovered air. The alphabet had yet to be invented.

However, the books
had
been transported here by someone, and Del was pleased to find them, particularly the many leather-bound volumes of verse. Normally, in an effort to find out why people were so peculiar, she read nothing but psychology. Even after she knew psychologists did not know, she kept reading it from force of habit, in the hope that she might come across a formula for survival directed specifically at her:
Del Shaw, follow these instructions to the letter!
Poetry was a change.

She lay in a deckchair on the deserted side veranda and read in the mellow three o'clock, four o'clock sunshine. There was, eternally, the smell of grass and burning bush, and the homely noise of dishes floating up from someone's kitchen along the path of yellow earth, hidden by trees. And she hated the chair, the mould-spotted book, the sun, the smells, the sounds, her supine self.

They came unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon
.

‘It's like us, exactly like us and this place,' she said to her mother, fiercely brushing her long brown hair in front of the dressing table's wavy mirror. ‘Always afternoon. Everyone lolling about. Nobody
doing
anything.'

‘My goodness!' Her mother stripped the sheets off the bed to take home to the laundry. ‘I thought we'd all been active enough this weekend to please anyone. And I don't see much afternoon about Monday morning.'

‘Active! That isn't what I mean. Anyway, I don't mean here or this weekend. I mean everyone, everywhere, all the time. Ambling round till they die.' Oh, but that wasn't what she meant, either.

Mrs Shaw's headache look appeared. ‘It's off to the doctor with you tonight, miss!'

Del set her teeth together. When her mother had left the room with her arms full of linen, still darting sharp glances at her daughter, Del closed her eyes and raised her face to the ceiling.

Let me
die
.

The words seemed to be ground from her voiceless body, to be ground, powdered stone, from her heart.

She breathed very slowly; she slowly righted her head, carefully balancing its weight on her neck. Then she pulled on her suede jacket, lifted her bag, and clattered down the uneven stone steps to the jetty. It always swayed when anyone set foot on it.

When the cottage had been so patched and cleaned that, short of a great expenditure of capital, no further improvement was possible, Hector Shaw ceased to find any purpose in his visits to it. True, there was still the pool to be tackled, but the summer had gone by without any active persuasion, any pleading, any teasing, from his wife and daughter. And if
they
were indifferent, far be it from him…

Then there was another thing. Not that it had any connection with the place, with being on Scotland Island, but it had the side effect of making the island seem less—safe, salubrious, desirable. Jack Rivers died from a heart attack one Sunday morning. Only fifty-five he was, and a healthier-looking fellow you couldn't have wished to meet.

Since the night young Martin Rivers had ruined their poker parties, they had seen very little of Jack and Grace. Sometimes on the ferry they had bumped into each other, and when they had the Shaws, at least, were sorry it had all worked out so badly. Jack and Grace were good company. It was hard not to feel bitter about the boy having spoiled their nice neighbourly friendship so soon before his father died. Perhaps if Jack had spent more time playing poker and less doing whatever he did do after the Saturdays stopped…

On a mild midwinter night, a few weeks after Jack Rivers' funeral, the Shaw family sat by the fire. Del was gazing along her corduroy slacks into the flames, away from her book. Her parents were silent over a game of cards.

Mr Shaw took a handful of cashew nuts from a glass dish at his side and started to chew. Then, leaning back in his chair, his eyes still fixed on his cards, he said, ‘By the way, the place's up for sale.'

His wife stared at him. ‘What place?'

‘
This
place.' He gave her his sour, patient look. ‘It's been on Dalgety's books for three weeks.'

‘What for?' Del asked, conveying by the gentleness of her tone her total absence of criticism. It was dangerous to question him, but then it was dangerous not to, too.

‘Well, there isn't much to do round here now. And old Jack's popped off—' (He hadn't meant to say that!) Crunching the cashew nuts, he slid down in his chair expansively, every supra-casual movement premeditated as though he were playing Hamlet at Stratford.

The women breathed deeply, not without regret, merely accepting this new fact in their lives. Mrs Shaw said, ‘Oh!' and Del nodded her comprehension. Changing their positions imperceptibly, they prepared to take up their occupations again in the most natural and least offensive ways they could conceive. There was enormous potential danger in any radical change of this sort.

‘Ye–es,' said Mr Shaw, drawing the small word out to an extraordinary length. ‘Dalgety's telling them all to come any Saturday or Sunday afternoon.' Still he gazed at his handful of cards, then he laid them face down on the table, and with a thumb thoughtfully rubbed the salt from the cashews into the palm of his other hand. It crumbled onto his knees, and he dusted it down to the rug, seeming agreeably occupied in its distribution.

‘Ye–es,' he said again, while his wife and daughter gazed at him painfully. ‘When and if anyone takes the place, I think we'd better use the cash to go for a trip overseas. What do you say? See the Old Country…Even the boat trip's pretty good, they tell me. You go right round the coast here (that takes about a week), then up to Colombo, Bombay, Aden, through the Suez, then up through the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Messina past some volcano, and past Gibraltar to Marseilles, then London.'

There was silence.

Mr Shaw turned away from the table and his game, and looked straight into his wife's grey eyes—a thing he rarely did. Strangers were all right, he could look at them, but with relations, old acquaintances, his spirit, unconscious, was ashamed and uneasy.

‘Go away?' his wife repeated, turning a dreadful colour.

He said, ‘Life's short. I've earned a holiday. Most of my typists've been abroad. We'll have a year. We'll need a year.
If
someone turns up on the ferry one day and
wants
the place, that is. There's a bit of a slump in real estate just now, but I guess we'll be okay.'

And they looked at each other, the three of them, with unfamiliar awe. They were about to leave this dull pretty city where they were all so hard to live with, and go to places they had read about, where the world was, where things happened, where the photographs of famous people came from, where history was, and snow in cities, and works of art, and splendour…

Poetry and patience were discarded from that night, while everyone did extra jobs about the cottage to add to its attractiveness and value. Mrs Shaw and Del planted tea trees and hibiscus bushes covered with flowers of palest apricot, and pink streaked with red. Mr Shaw cemented the open space under the house (it was propped up on columns on its steep hillside) and the area underneath was like a large extra room, shady and cool. They put some long bamboo chairs down there, fitted with cushions.

Most weekend afternoons, jobs notwithstanding, Del went to the side veranda to lean over the railing out of sight and watch the ferry go from jetty to jetty and return to Church Point. She watched and willed, but no one ever came to see the house.

It was summer again, and the heatwave broke records. Soon it was six months since the night they had talked about the trip.

Always the island was the same. It was scented, self-sufficient; the earth was warm underfoot, and the air warm to breathe. The hillside sat there, quietly, rustling quietly, a smug curving hillside that had existed for a long time. The water was blue and sparkled with meaningless beauty. Smoke stood in the sunny sky above the bush here and there across the bay, where other weekend visitors were cooking chops, or making coffee on fuel stoves.

Del watched the ferries and bargained with fate, denying herself small pleasures, which was easy for her to do. She waited. Ferries came and went round the point, but never called at their place.

They lost heart. In the end, it would have been impossible even to mention the trip. But they all grieved with a secret enduring grief, as if at the death of the one person they had loved. Indeed, they grieved for their own deaths. Each so unknown and un-understood, who else could feel the right regret? From being eaten by the hillside, from eating one another, there had been the chance of a reprieve. Now it was evidently cancelled, and in the meantime irretrievable admissions had been made.

At the kindergarten one Tuesday afternoon Miss Lewis, who was in charge, called Del to the telephone. She sat down, leaning her forehead on her hand before lifting the receiver.

‘Hello?'

‘Del, your father's sold the cottage to a pilot. Somebody Davies. He's bought the tickets. We've just been in to get our cabins. We're leaving in two months.'

‘What? A pilot?'

‘Yes. We're going on the
Arcadia
on the 28th of November. The cabins are lovely. Ours has got a porthole. We'll have to go shopping, and get injections and passports…'

‘We're
going
?'

‘Of course we are, you funny girl! We'll tell you all about it when you get home tonight. I've started making lists.'

They were going. She was going away. Out in the world she would escape from them. There would be room to run, outside this prison.

‘So, we're off,' her mother said.

Del leaned sideways against the wall, looking out at the eternal afternoon, shining with all its homey peace and glory. ‘Oh, that's good,' she said. ‘That's good.'

8

Lance Harper, His Story

What's a classic? Lance Harper wondered. He was sitting in a bar watching television the night he wondered this for exactly the millionth time. And, surely, with the millionth assault on this intractable question, Lance's feeling for it could be said to have passed from passion to monomania. If so, it could account for what happened.

Sometimes he used to say to his mother, ‘I don't know why I'm living, Mum.' And she, hearing that he was no more than half-joking, was proud that Lance was not like other boys, and did not even think, You were an accident, Lance.

But he mightn't have cared, anyway. What is a classic? That was the point. He had hoped, when the whole question of classics presented itself to him, that as he was going on twenty-one, five feet eleven and still growing, his last wisdom tooth almost through, the answer was an instinctive thing like all the rest, and one morning he would wake up knowing. But he hadn't.

Now, anyone observant could have seen he wasn't well: he seldom smiled, his naturally deep-set, dark-grey eyes receded, melancholy, under his brow. But, of course, one of the facts of Lance's life was that it had never contained a soul who had dreamed of observing him. And his heavy frame, hollowed out by restless days and listless nights, looked healthy enough as he swung along the girders of each new skyscraper.

‘He's a fabulous colour,' his mother, Pearl, told her boss, running up another red Christmas stocking on the machine. ‘Fabulous tan. And his hair's all yellow with the sun.'

‘Got a girl?' Bert measured off red cloth.

‘No. His mum's the only girl Lance's interested in.'

Bert paused and looked at her.

‘That's all right! You can scoff! He's working overtime to pay off a new fridge for me, and he's trading in his car for a new one so I can be comfortable when we go out.'

‘I'll get some more of that cotton,' said Bert, disappearing.

So that close, hostile look of perplexity on Lance's face was never remarked. It was his habitual way of looking and was mistaken for the quizzical squint the sun gives most Australian men. Lance's dad had it, too, but with him it really was the sun. He was a builder by trade, like Lance, and swarmed over scaffolding in all weathers.

When Lance was five his mother went away one night without him, just stopping to hiss in his dark room, ‘Yes, I'm going, love. Dad's sending me away. He says you both like Myrna Barnes better than Mum. What? You don't? Well, someone's telling lies to poor old Mum. I'm off, anyway, Lance. Do what Mrs Barnes tells you.'

And his father said, ‘What? Where's she gone? What? I'll give you a good clip on the ear if I hear any more out of you. Get out into the back yard! Go on!'

About once a year after that, his mum or dad left home forever. The period of absence varied, and sometimes Lance was taken, sometimes kept, but the departures were fairly predictable and made quite a stable feature in his life.

He was invariably placed on one side of the dispute as if by some impartial referee: now he was Dad's boy, now Mum's. But sometimes, in odd moments of reconciliation, it struck his parents that Lance was a boy who kept things up too long—a moody boy, nice-looking but not nice. And sometimes they combined to chide him for his lack of friends. Not that
they
had any friends, but occasionally they felt it would be normal and flattering to them if Lance would extend himself and acquire a few.