Dark Places (28 page)

Norah hurried around, pointing for the men to lift this, carry that, move the other; she ticked off points on her fingers to the woman in black, and the woman in black smoothed her frills and nodded obediently. She hastened from the tea-table under the jacaranda to the flower-arrangement, from the sweeping of the verandah one last time to the cutting back of a bit of intrusive bougainvillea.

Mother was there, with a little apron on over her bottle-green costume, and met my eye: I was not sure if she had heard me speak to Lilian, but Mother's ears had always been sharp. ‘It is her big day, Albion,' she came over to me and said, and I could not tell if this was simply one of her unanswerable trite remarks, or a reproach. ‘And your next big day, much bigger than this, my dear,' she smiled at Lilian, ‘will be your wedding, and you, Albion, will be giving her away.'

Giving her away! I wanted to retort that a man of business never gives anything away, but the humour would not be appreciated by my present audience, and I reminded myself to work this little witticism into my next conversation with Ogilvie.

All the same, it brought me up short, and I looked at Lilian, standing patiently now while Mother tweaked at her seams. I could go so far as to imagine her dressed in white lace, leaning on my arm for that last walk down the aisle, but beyond that my mind simply would not go. Some man, whispering sweet nothings in her ear as he penetrated garments one by one, some man waking up next to her in the same bed? No, the thing was impossible. ‘Plenty of time to worry about that, Mother,' I told her briskly. ‘Let us get one thing done at a time, shall we?'

But the hint was lost on both of them: Lilian interrupted me, crying, ‘Look, Aunt Kitty is here!' and rushed off across the lawn, heedless of the way her skirt caught on the plumbago as she passed it, and flung her arms around Kristabel with what I thought was an over-done demonstration of affection. Kristabel hugged her back, and got out something wrapped in coloured tissue, and suddenly there was a little clutch of women all exclaiming over some trinket, and I was left alone on the lawn with my words falling emptily on no ears but my own.

When they had finished exclaiming over Kristabel's gift, and when every cup had been dusted, every chair-cushion plumped up, Norah came over in her sky-blue silk from Kennedy—another arm and another leg—and stood beside me. She laid a hand on my arm; I could not remember her having made such a gesture of affection to me in public since the memorable day I had proposed, when we had appeared among the aunts and mothers to announce the event. It was so unexpected I had to try to turn my flinch into a cough. She said with unaccustomed warmth, ‘Oh, Albion, it is going to be such success, I feel sure.' I could feel the warmth of her flesh through the fabric of my sleeve, and remembered what I had not bothered to think of for a long time: that the inner skin of Norah's thighs was hot, and so soft that a thumbnail along it could leave a mark. Later on, perhaps, I would personally supervise the peeling-off of the sky-blue silk, and the examination of that inner skin of the thigh.

I was conscious of the picture we made: the charming Mrs Albion Singer and her husband the distinguished Albion Gidley Singer, happy married couple, proud parents of a brace of children, affectionately arm-in-arm: what a delightful picture for anyone who did not look too closely! I placed my hand over Norah's to retain it for a little longer, and wished Lilian and the woman in black were not the only audience of this moment.

‘Well, Albion, what a significant day,' she was beginning again, but in the nick of time I heard the gate open, and could become the perfect host, excusing himself intimacy with his wife in order to greet his first guests, a clutch of Lilian's little friends.

Oh, Lilian and her little girl-friends! I went down the path towards them with a sense of weariness, but summoning the avuncular manner I had developed for these occasions. Now, was it Ursula who had the rheumatic mother, I tried to remember, or was it Enid, and was this one Enid, or was it Myrtle?

But I was in for a surprise. Only yesterday these creatures had been simply little girls, skinny or tubular, freckled or dark, with yellow hair ribbons or blue ones. Overnight they had revealed themselves to be females. Here was little Ursula, for example: she had always been the pretty one, and now that I looked, I could see that she was coming along very nicely indeed under her spotted batiste.

Enid had always been a big wooden sort of girl with a muscular neck that strained the seams of her muslin, and now she careered through the gate like some big runaway bit of machinery, all elbows, crashing against me and blurting
Sorry! Sorry!
But she, too, was no longer a child: there was a humid fleshiness about her as she disentangled herself from me, mottling darkly around the neck and panting from our encounter, and the way she stood with her arms crossed tightly over her chest made you aware that there was a certain amount of meaty charm going on under there. Enid was not going to be one to set the pulse racing, but she was a tryer. Her hair bore the marks of the curling-iron, and had been painstakingly arranged so as to cover her great domed forehead: she was going to give it all she had. A man who knew a thing or two could see that Enid, by dint of sheer application to strategically placed curls and ruffles, would eventually succeed in finding some young man who did not mind a wife built like an ironbark.

Somehow, the layers of fabric of these other girls' frocks caused a man to speculate on what lay beneath: those artful tucks and flounces hinted at things unseen, half-concealed possibilities, and drew the interested male eye to things that were all the more enticing for being hidden. The essence of the feminine lay in that concealment: a man knew there was flesh there, but it was flesh imagined, not seen. How different from Lilian's frank bulk!

Last time I had seen them, these girls had looked on me simply as Lilian's father, a person in a suit who might startle them now and then by asking them how their mother was, or quizzing them jovially on the number of gills in a firkin, and they would stare blankly at that person in the suit and do their best to answer his questions. Now what a pretty flutter they were in!

Silly little things, they had no conception of why speaking to Lilian's father should suddenly throw them into such confusion, and make them blush so hot. But their bodies knew what their minds did not: that, in conversing with me, the female in them was responding to the irresistible call of the male. I felt myself rise up to meet such a clarion-call from biology, and all at once the day promised well.

Nothing had changed at this type of tea-and-cake pimping. The tallest boys still danced attendance on the prettiest girls, and out on the periphery the stunted boys, the beanpole girls, and the ones whose clothes had been handed down from someone else, tried to make do with each other.

On chairs in the shade, a flotilla of majestic-bosomed mothers sat with eyes as hard as china, exchanging remarks from lips that barely moved. They assessed the blood-stock on display before them: the good figure of one girl was weighed in the balance against her plain face; the cheerfulness of this one weighed against her tallness; the pimples of this one weighed against the fact that she would come into the Carmody fortune. The young men could be handsome or plain, short or tall, pimpled or smooth: none of that mattered. What the mothers saw when they looked at them were the bricks and mortar, the grassy acres, the pounds in the bank of which these young men were the promissory notes. The flinty mothers sitting with their reticules beside them were not taken in: like me, they recognised a piece of business when they saw it.

We knew this was business, but we had to pretend. Ursula fluttered and tittered and pursed her little red mouth at her cup of tea, and showed her little pink tongue, popping in another piece of cake. Like all the best pretty girls, Ursula pretended to think she was plain. ‘I hope to go to the Teachers' College, Mr Singer,' she mouthed earnestly at me. ‘I think a teacher has so much to offer.'

Ursula knew, quite as well as I did, that she would be snapped up in no time to become the better half of some young man, and begin doing what Nature intended for her: reproducing the species. But modesty is at its most charming, when it issues from a succulent little mouth like a ripe peach.

Poor Enid was a realist. ‘I have my sights set on the Teacher Training, too, Mr Singer,' she told me. ‘A girl has to have something to fall back on,' and I could hear an echo of some sighing parent. ‘She had better have something, Fred,' I could imagine, ‘just in case, Fred.'

Young men had deteriorated since my day. These were terribly feeble things, in striped blazers that made them look like some kind of beetle, holding tiny spoons with huge red hands, trying to find a way to stand that did not make them look as if their underwear was strangling them. They nodded and smiled too much, they blushed and shifted from foot to gigantic foot, while the girls frothed on, running the show: at least in my day we had known better than to let the girls rule the roost.

It was a father's job to get the measure of the young men who came to his daughter's house, so I chose the nearest one, and began by asking him in a friendly enough way about his plans for the future. Of all these spindly boys, he was the spindliest; there was something disorganised about his face, as if he had borrowed each part from someone else: the mouth was too big, the eyes too small, the ears from a giant, the nose possibly off a bird.

‘Oh,' he said, and jerked so that the tea slopped into his saucer, and I was already beginning to regret my choice, and wish I had spoken to the boy with the bat-wing ears, at this moment listening respectfully to little Ursula. ‘Oh yes,' said this one, as if reminding himself of the existence of a future that needed thinking about. ‘Well, Dad has got a property, Mr Singer.' I could see this boy, Duncan was his name, squirming with his cup of tea and his pikelet—he did not dare take a bite, in case I came at him with another question and his mouth would be too jammed to answer— so he stood clutching his pikelet and the teacup like a clown about to start juggling.

‘A property,' I prompted, all patience, perhaps rather visibly all patience, and Duncan seemed to gulp, so his long knobbly neck convulsed like a goanna's. ‘Out West, Mr Singer, out Collarenebri way, do you know Collarenebri at all, sir?' and he stuffed the pikelet in his mouth, clearly hoping that I would make some lengthy answer on the subject of Collarenebri. ‘No,' I said, and watched in silence as his freckled cheeks distorted around the pikelet.

When he had finally swallowed, I said, ‘And is that where you see yourself, in the years to come?' Thinking this rather a dainty way of saying
when your father is dead
, but Duncan was not a boy to appreciate a nuance. ‘Oh, well, you know,' he began—how I hated this modern habit of prefacing everything with a fanfare of meaningless phrases!—‘well yes, he hopes I will take over the place when he dies, and I suppose I will, but poetry is more in my line, really.' I let a short silence fall before I repeated, ‘Poetry?' But instead of flushing and thinking better of this, Duncan opened his wide mouth and laughed a big silly laugh. ‘Oh yes, I have written reams of the stuff !' He seemed to have no shame, so I went carefully; you never knew when some no-hoper might turn out to be a prodigy. I could not ask bluntly,
Are you any good?
but I knew the polite code, and asked, ‘Oh? And where have you been published?' Duncan took a gulp of tea, audibly rinsed it around his mouth, and said cheerfully, ‘Oh, none of it is published, Mr Singer, and it is probably no good, but it is what I enjoy.'

I was rendered speechless by this: it was like talking to someone from Mars. The worst of it was, Duncan appeared to be quite unaware of the embarrassing nature of what he had said: it was as if he thought it was the right thing to go on doing something as unproductive as poetry, although you were no good at it, just because you
enjoyed
it! I watched him as he glanced around; he was entirely untroubled, the clown beaming around in the moment before his pants fell down.

It was hopeless: I could only trust that not all of these insects in stripes were as bad as this one. I would come back to the others later, but I could not bear any more of them now.

I strolled over and stood close to a little knot of the girls, fiddling with a fresh cup of tea while I listened to them cooing and billing away together. Like the boys behind the bike-shed with Morrison in my own younger days, these females were concerned with only one thing: the opposite sex, and how to get hold of a sample of it. But there was a difference: the fascination for these shallow girls was the romance angle of it all. I could see, watching them smirk and titter, that they had swallowed hook, line and sinker every lie that had ever been invented to sugar the pill of biological necessity.
Lo
,
the Dawn Is Breaking
and its ilk had taught them all they knew, so they naturally thought they were experiencing love, or despair, or some such large noble thing, because
Lo
,
the Dawn is Breaking
told them they must be. What a pack of gulls they were, all of them, when this strutting was about nothing more or less than copulation!

I was immensely glad to be no longer young. It was not a bashful youth, his body a burden to him, who stood now among the teacups, but a solid block of man-of-the-world in a dark suit, not ashamed to take up plenty of space among these wisps of virgins.

Now the basilisk-mothers were forcing tennis-racquets into the hands of the young folk, and propelling them off to the tennis court. These pimping mothers seemed keen to encourage the girls and boys to be alone on the court and in the tennis-shed, unsupervised by any adult eye. But I saw no reason why risks should be taken on the Singer property. I appointed myself umpire and chaperone, and tried not to creak as I swung myself up to the top of the umpire's chair.