Dark Places (27 page)

Miss Entwhistle came gracefully last, puffing in the prettiest way: the exertion had put a charming colour in her cheeks. Lilian was the colour of Rundle's beetroot, and was blowing like a whale. She won by a good margin, and the oafs unlocked their hands from over their chests, clapping rather more enthusiastically than I thought warranted by a ladies' egg-and-spoon race, and Lilian, sweaty and dishevelled, grinned around as if she had never heard of mockery, and waved at me as if she might have escaped my attention. I clapped, as faintly as I could, but the cockroach was actually cheering her.

I was a democratic man of business relaxing with his employees, and I intended to roll up my sleeves later for a game of cricket with these lads, but one could carry informality too far. I strode over, casually but quickly, and said in a voice not intended to carry, ‘Lilian, you have made a spectacle of yourself.' The laughter dropped away from her, and how hideous she now looked, scowling, with her cheeks scarlet and her nose shiny! I was overwhelmed by the dreadful vigour of the blood in her face and her sheer coarse bulk.

With a hand under her elbow—I could feel the heat of her pulsing against me—I steered her away from where the eyes watched from under the cloth caps, and handed her a dipper of water from the bucket and a comb from my pocket. ‘Set yourself to rights, Lilian,' I said. ‘And remember next time that there is no need to try so hard.'

Like Lilian, I did not believe in coming second in a race: a person might as well come last if they were not going to win. I had to admit that, had I been unlucky enough to have been born a girl, I might have been as Lilian was. In that sense, I could understand Lilian's refusal to tuck her animal fleshiness away, and join the simpering hypocritical games: I could see that without realising it she was trying to tear at the tissue of lies going on around her. I should have been pleased that she had the wit to see through it, and that she was not simply another in the vast herd of human blanks.

But the point was that I had not been born a woman, and what was proper in me was mortifying in my daughter. I saw now—too late!—that I had not done her any favours, in encouraging her intellect. My daughter had grown into a freak of nature, a misfit with the brain of a man in the body of a woman.

When John was chivvied along by Norah to join us for another cup of the everlasting tea, I was struck afresh by the perversity of life, for he would have made an excellent girl. He mooned around at the edge of things holding his cup and saucer crooked, so that tea splashed on the cuffs of his creams, his head sat at a cringing angle on his neck, and his shoulders were hunched over as if to make himself shorter. He had refused to go in any of the games at all, saving us all the embarrassment of seeing the way his feet appeared to flap on the ends of his ankles when he tried to run, and how his elbows stuck out like a chook in a fluster.

The problem was that in spite of John's frog-like look, his pale damp skin, his fears, his silences, his stupidity in the face of even the simplest building-block or golliwog—in spite of all this, John was a male. It was hard to imagine he would ever amount to much of a man, but he was male; whereas Lilian, no matter how brave and no matter how bright, would always belong to the secondary sex.

I thought ruefully of all the muslins and voiles from which I had chosen Norah: it was clear to me now that I must have ignored some signal from nature, and had picked an unsuitable set of genes. It was a bitter irony. I had approached the problem systematically, researching the latest scientific ideas and thinking the thing through logically, and yet had ended up with such a failure that my line was likely to end with me. Others—fools—had merely let their fancy dictate their choice to them: they had swallowed all the nonsense about love, and chosen their mates on great gusts of blind feeling— these fools had produced manly young chaps and sweet-voiced little girls who would all reproduce themselves copiously—there was a monstrous injustice somewhere!

Cricket was another of those manly accomplishments I had long ago made sure I was competent at, and during last year's picnic, although Mr Singer's team had lost with a good grace to Mr Rundle's team, Mr Singer himself had put up a fine show. In fact, he had actually driven the ball so hard into the cleft of a paperbark that it had had to be left there for the tree to swallow. Efficient Rundle had produced a spare ball, and what a cheer had gone up for Mr Singer!

I had felt last year that Rundle was uncomfortable at trouncing Mr Singer's team quite so thoroughly. When the subject had come up during the months that followed, I noticed he hastened to remind everyone of the ball stuck in the tree, and several times he had got up to demonstrate in front of the desk, with a rolled-up newspaper, just the kind of action Mr Singer had used to get it there. ‘Classic cricket,' he would repeat. ‘Absolutely classic cricket.' This year, Rundle announced that he would not play: he appointed himself umpire instead. ‘Oh, I am getting on, Mr Singer,' he twinkled at me, as if this was an amusingly original phrase, ‘time to hand over to the younger ones now, sir,' and it was the gingery lout with the pectorals who was going to open the bowling against me.

Nature had been kind to Rundle, providing him with a dusty patch of flat ground among the trees. Sunlight poured itself down all around, insects droned away in the afternoon heat, and the leaves far above shook themselves together spasmodically in a fluky breeze. The clearing lay expectant under the sun: the wicket, hammered into the hard ground with the back of Rundle's axe, gave the patch of dirt a human meaning.

I strode to the wicket feeling my muscles moving pleasurably under my shirt—a gentleman knew when it was appropriate to remove one's jacket, and that time was now—and limbered up with a few swings. I was no muscle-bound bruiser, but I was a fine figure of a man, a man in his prime. Over on the rugs under the trees, the women watched me. Norah began to clap her hands together; she did not actually go so far as to produce any sound, but the other women soon took it up. I saw Lilian beating her palms together as vigorously as if knocking the dirt out of a rug, and Miss Baxter and Miss Entwhistle going at it conscientiously, keeping an eye on Mrs Singer so they would know when to stop. They worked away at it in their different ways as their males gathered in the clearing, ready to perform before them, but the bush swallowed the sound they made so that it was as insignificant as the rattle of a beetle through leaves.

Up at the other end, the ginger boy was snapping at his braces where they bulged over his chest, and grinding the ball into his groin. He stared down the pitch at me, but I could see that his blank insect-eyes were not registering his employer standing at the other end, or the father of the girl he had ogled as she galloped over the grass with an egg. This boy's eyes saw only a problem of distance, speed, and angle: Albion Gidley Singer was nothing more to him than a thing in front of a wicket.

As he walked back to start his run, I took up my stand, thumping the end of the bat into the dirt, flexing my wrists: I was already relishing the percussion the ball would make as it connected with the bat. From far, far away across the sunlit grass, I saw him begin his run. He had started much too far back, like all beginners. He was positively small in the distance, crabbing towards me with the sweat-stains showing in his armpits, and his boots beating up the dust. A bird warbled abruptly and swooped low over the wicket; he was still miles away, and I was still readying myself, gripping and re-gripping the bat, when I heard a clatter behind me, and Rundle was braying ‘Out! Out!' The fool, did he not see we had not even started yet?

It could only be a mistake, or perhaps a joke. Who had knocked the wicket over so that it sprawled stupidly on the grass? What was this silence, in which I heard the wind in leaves? What was this stillness, everyone moonfaced, watching me? ‘Out,' Rundle said again, but quietly. ‘Clean bowled, Mr Singer sir, I am afraid to say,' and there was young Parkinson from Accounts already coming towards me and reaching out for the bat.

‘Jolly bad luck, Father,' Lilian trumpeted as I sat down, ‘he was as fast as anything, wasn't he, Mother?' I wanted to crush that red face, to stop her loud artless voice from going on. My chest was aching with the outrage of it, my throat stringy with suppressed tears.
How dare they
,
how dare they
, my heart repeated, but just who it was that had dared, and just what they had done, I could not quite have said.

The thick-necked ginger lout had the face of a cockroach, but he was a dab hand with a ball. I recovered my equilibrium somewhat when Parkinson was dismissed for 2, O'Malley managed a mere 5, and Gorman was out for a duck as I had been. With each of my team-mate's disgraces, my own shame faded. ‘Oh, he is awfully good,' Lilian cried after watching him deliver a sizzler to McAllister, who frankly ducked. ‘He is amazing, Father!' and I was recovered enough to be gracious. ‘Yes indeed, Lilian, I happen to know the poor lad has never learnt to read, so what a good thing it is that he can throw a ball.

When the cricket was over, Mr Singer made sure he led the applause, and was to be seen nodding and smiling, and making a remark to the young lady beside him. Our sweaty genius of the ball stood luminous with sunlight in the middle of the clearing, grinning and rubbing the ball along his thigh as if he did not know how to stop. In fact, Mr Singer had to go out onto the pitch in the end, to shake him by the hand and more or less usher him off the pitch and over to the refreshment tent. I saw Miss Flaherty get up from the grass and start over towards him. But off the pitch, out of the sunlight that lit him up, and with the ball removed from his grip by Mr Singer, so that he stood with his large hands dangling, he was simply a sweaty gawky lad in pants too short in the leg, and I saw her falter, reconsider, and turn away.

The day finished as it had begun, in a colossal tedium of folding things, and packing things, and installing things and people into carts, and jolting back through the dusk with a headache. For many a weary mile, Rundle exclaimed at the performance of my daughter. ‘My word, Mr Singer,' he said, and said again, and then said once more, ‘she will not be beaten, will she Mr Singer? My word, Mr Singer, your daughter certainly does not mind exerting herself,' and so on and on. Was Rundle simply a blind mule of a man, with not an idea in the wide world of the things a father might not welcome in a daughter? Or was Rundle a sneak, mocking me in his meeching way? I nodded and did my best to assemble an agreeable expression on my face, but I wanted nothing better than to forget the way my daughter had wobbled and joggled her way to victory, and to forget, too, the way her father had been vanquished without even lifting his bat to the ball.

Twenty-Five

I HAD NEVER believed in the concept of the birthday. Everyone is born on one day or another, and what could it matter if it were this day rather than that? In my own childhood, they had forever been pestering me to agree that I felt different now that I was seven, or ten, or whatever it was, and I had always refused to play their game. ‘No, I feel no different at all,' I had always said, and watched them recoil.

When Lilian turned sixteen, Norah felt strongly enough to urge some kind of celebration. ‘Sixteen is an important moment in a girl's life,' was as much as my silly wife could attempt by way of reasoning. ‘It is traditional, Albion, for a girl.' A man such as myself could see why, and I had no hesitation in telling her, ‘Yes, Norah, and the reason is that at sixteen the female of our species is biologically at her peak. From then on it is all downhill. It hardly seems something to celebrate.'

Occasionally Norah could surprise me. Although I knew where she had got the phrase—I had also read the piece in the paper on the rituals of the blacks—it was still a pleasure to have my wife say something a man could respect. ‘It is by way of being a rite of passage,' Norah said pompously, and since this was clearly all she could remember from the piece, she said it again. ‘A rite of passage, you know, Albion, she has a right to a rite.' A frown creased her brow then, and she went away puzzling.

But she had succeeded: seen purely in the light of reason as a rite of passage I was willing to agree to a birthday party with a few of Lilian's friends. A new frock was ordered from Kennedy, invitations were issued to all the Ursulas and the Enids, to all their mothers, and to sundry Dicks and Edwards, and trestles were set up under the jacarandas.

We hired a man to do the lifting, and there was a woman from down the road got up in a black dress and a frilly apron, to hand the cake around. The day was all it should have been, with sun in reasonable quantities and no wind; the gaudy tiers of azaleas gave the garden an appropriate magnificence, and apart from a last-minute bird-dropping on the damask, all went according to plan.

A great deal of effort had gone into Lilian. Hours had been spent with Kennedy the dressmaker, and I knew that this white muslin, so cunningly pleated and gathered so as to make her seem buxom rather than elephantine, would end up costing an arm and a leg. Her hair had been pinned up in honour of the coming-of-age, so that she seemed quite foreign to me, and to herself, a little girl playacting at being a lady with her hair up, mincing in her mother's high-heeled shoes.

She stood around on the flagstone terrace as the last-minute arrangements were made, putting a hand up to the back of her neck now and then, feeling the way the hair was pulled up the wrong way into its arrangement on the top of her head, smoothing the secretive underneath hair that was suddenly exposed.

‘Stop fiddling with your hair, Lilian,' I told her, trying to be friendly, but hearing my tone abrupt. ‘People will think you have nits.' She glanced at me to see whether I was joking, and I forced my face into a show of smile: Albion Gidley Singer, every inch the paterfamilias, giving his daughter a little tip on correct behaviour.