Down in the City (8 page)

He pulled up by the side of the footpath where the others stood, still talking, working themselves up to a state of repentant joviality before they dispersed.

‘Well!' He grinned possessively at Esther. ‘Are you ready to come home?'

She looked directly at him, and his grin faded.

‘No answer!' Clem chaffed to break a silence that lasted a moment too long. ‘Take her by force, Stan!'

And so they parted: cool cheeks brushed, hands touched, and Esther waved to the row of faces as the car shot forward up the hill.

Stan said at last: ‘Everything went all right, didn't it, Est?'

‘Yes,' she answered, in a high voice.

He stopped for a red light. ‘It won't ever happen again, Est. Do you hear me?…I won't ever do that to you again.' He glanced at her, and after a minute, demanded: ‘Well, what did I
do
?'

Someone in a car behind him hooted; he saw the lights had changed, and moved off again in silence. Neither of them spoke until they stopped at the garage entrance of Romney Court.

‘Aw, hell!' Stan cursed dejectedly, sulky because he had fallen down like this after three months of perfection. ‘What d'you think, pet? D'you hate me or something? Mmm?' He was not looking at her.

Not answering, Esther sighed and closed her eyes with weariness, but there was, in her silence, nothing of hate. After a pause she said, ‘Let's go up now.'

And if this was not the reconciliation Stan had hoped for, he was aware that her forbearance was more than he deserved.

He went into the flat with an air of angry defiance, directing his attitude not at Esther, but at the possible reminders of his late excess. As he switched on the lights his eyes darted, his head turned, as if he expected to be confronted by his drunken self. Amongst the inanimate, yet knowing, furniture, enclosed by the familiar walls and floor and ceiling, he was ill at ease. Alone with Esther he was miserable, wanting and not wanting to talk to her and touch her.

For all his fears, the flat was quiet and tidy. The wireless was silent, the rugs straight. Esther's newest purchase—a still life of fruit—glowed innocently on the wall. Stan was abashed by the peace around him.

No amount of goodwill could force Esther to break the trance she moved in. She was in a climate, in a country, where some grievous natural calamity had just been enacted, and she was reduced to blankest fear, uncertainty, exhaustion.

Long after she had fallen into a restless sleep Stan lay awake and thought of his childhood, and boyhood, and life before Esther. He remembered the paintless shack way out in the flat brown west; how there was never water, but always dust. Water was the thing, the only thing, he could connect with his mother: she was always saying, ‘If we had water…' But then she had died. After that, his father stopped digging and planting and mending fences. He stayed in the house all day, wandering through the shabby rooms, fingering the faded cotton bedspreads, letting the well-polished linoleum dull and cake with dirt.

Six years old, silent, watchful, padding barefoot over the dry, baked earth, Stan would gaze wide-eyed through the crack in the kitchen door at the man with his head on his arms—his father—who scarcely spoke to him now.

Stan could see the small figure trailing around the yard, dragging a big stick behind him, standing on the sagging wire fence and gazing out along the bare dusty road. The sound of a solitary birdcall filled the brown and blue land.

In the darkness his expression hardened; his eyes filled with a brooding hatred as he recalled the day when they came and took him away to the square, redbrick building on the outskirts of Sydney. It was there that he had spent the next nine years of his life. It was there that he first learned that he was a poor kid, an orphan who smelled of the institution. Exactly nobody. The memory of the indignities that he, Stan Peterson, had suffered, made him go rigid, made him glare into the darkness. He thought of the matrons and officials who had controlled their soap-shiny charges, and fed them, but had not liked them, had not even taught them.

How came man on earth? Stan neither knew nor wondered. If he had been asked, he might have said that things were as they had always been. And how was the world governed? He would have found that even easier to answer. By politicians born of other politicians—a great racket, but a closed one.

Once he had known a rule of grammar, a rule of geometry, the dates of some of the English kings, what were the main products of Australia, and when it was discovered.

A fat lot of help that ever was to me, he thought. I just had to make my own chances. A man's used his head and got on, made some cash. He's somebody at last. There hasn't been any trouble yet, either. Better not be, not now that there's Est…

Esther. Why had he acted like that—as if he hated her? He felt that he
had
hated her, too, this afternoon. He had envied her—her life, her family, her very self. He knew it was nothing but the prospect of that damned party that had made him rake up Nobby and Jock and drag them back. That, and the envy and the fear. Sometimes he was frightened of men like the Prescotts.

He was too old to cry. He had not cried when he was a very small boy and he was not going to start now. But tomorrow he would tell her that he would truly die for her—that he would not let a cold wind blow on her if he could help it.

CHAPTER NINE

Rachel Demster hung with her head and arms dangling over the balcony wall, wondering whether or not she would be sorry if she leaned further and fell. She wondered if Laura Maitland would be sorry if she were dead, and she thought not. She wondered about her father, and she thought not. Coming to her aunt and uncle, she saw them now in imagination as she had done so often in fact, as they dripped stickily round some parched, deserted golf course in the middle of summer. They're mad, she thought, just mad! And she sighed.

This must be ennui I feel, she thought, and wondered how to pronounce it. It felt like ennui, or perhaps it felt worse than that. If she had a dictionary she might have looked it up to see if she felt worse than ennui, but probably she would not.

The blood began to pound unpleasantly in her head, so she dragged herself up and flopped back into a chair. Another quiet, hot, horrible, boring Sunday! I can't bear it another second, she thought calmly. I'll go mad. All right—go mad. Who cares? You'd be better off. No, but I'm really desperate, I'll have to do something…And I will. I'll get a job. I'll advertise for one.

Immediately she was appalled at having made the decision, for she knew what she had said, she must do. She had promised herself, sometime around the age of twelve, that she would be truthful and true, just, reasonable and, when desirable, kind to herself; for it was clear that these necessary comforts were not to be depended upon from any other source.

She craned impulsively over the balcony to find someone to talk to, someone to tell, but the cement courtyard wore its blank Sunday look, and the balconies above were empty as far as she could see.

She sat back again in disgust, and tears tried to edge their way into her eyes, but their falseness irritated her. She knew very well that she could bear her ennui—if that was what it was—without tears. It was altogether the wrong time for them.

Head thrown back, eyes fixed on an incredibly high and windswept summer sky, she wished that she could disappear into its cool, airy distances. How much easier it would be than living. How much happier. Imagine floating along like a cloud or a bird, or just being a piece of sunny blue space. Rachel imagined, half smiled, then sighed, and went to find a pencil and paper so that she could draft her advertisement.

‘Intelligent girl (17) desires job,' she wrote. She looked at the bald black statement for some time, and pencilled the (17) over and over until she wore a hole in the paper.

If she lived to be sixty-seven she would have to work for fifty years, so it would have to be a good job. But what could anyone do for fifty years?

She rubbed the back of her neck and buried her fist in her cheek, trying to forget that Mrs Maitland had condemned her to remain single and solitary for the same length of time—consequently she could think of nothing else.

But do you care? Is it what you want most? she asked herself nicely. Sometimes it is, she confessed, and pictured a country cottage, roses round the door, babies on the floor, someone simple and kind coming home at night. They would sit by the fire and play the gramophone. And they would never think, and never plan, and never, never change. The country would be fresh and cool: there would be flowers, and a mountain and a stream. She sighed wholeheartedly.

Her aunt had always believed that a good and handsome young man would ride up on the allotted day and claim her as his own: a fairytale so often told that Rachel herself had half inclined to believe it. Then she saw that, to her aunt, the whole of life was a matter of hoping for luck and happy endings, of holding tight to the catchphrases that promised a golden future. But Laura, Mrs Maitland, was not like that, and she had said, speaking as if she
knew
, Rachel stressed to herself: ‘Even if you don't marry…' Obviously meaning: ‘You won't!'

And neither, thought the girl, would that other dream come true; that vaguer, more insistent dream of a Rachel who studied and understood, who instructed in the arts of honesty and justice, who ended wars and righted wrongs. But if at least, if only, there was someone who could see, who would talk…

She flew to the long mirror in her bedroom to see if her reflection had any answer to offer, but it gazed back, knowing itself ineffectual, no help at all. Still the same long arms and legs, the same hank of brown hair, and in the eyes, the old look of calm and resignation.

‘Oh, murder!' she exclaimed aloud. ‘That intelligent girl had better find a job soon.'

In the courtyard the Petersons' car horn sounded its mellow notes, proclaiming an arrival or a departure. Rachel ran out to the balcony and hurled herself half over the edge again, sick for the sight of someone, something. But when Stan, looking from the car window, saw her and called a greeting she drew back, suddenly shy.

Looking higher up, to the fourth space in the wall where Esther waited in the sun, smiling at him, Stan blew a kiss. Rachel's face was solemn with exaggerated shame as she moved further back: she felt that she had intruded unforgivably. So they really did love each other! She was full of awe.

The car seemed to be leaving; she thought she heard it on the road. Creeping lightly back to the edge, she made sure. Yes, it was gone. She shivered as the heat from the warm brick penetrated her arms. Blowing kisses! What romantic lives people lived! So much love everywhere, but no one even to care if she lived or died.

It wasn't fair: but even as she thought so, her mouth curved and her eyes softened to think that anyone should blow kisses to anyone.

‘Rachel! Rachel!' Esther called from above. ‘Could you come up for a little while?'

‘Me? Sure!' Eyes sparkling, she raced upstairs times two, and sometimes three, at a time. ‘Oh, sure!' Rachel Demster would always oblige and be where she was wanted. Just call and she would come.

Upstairs, she found Esther very friendly, very welcoming. ‘What's happening?' she asked, waving a hand at the confusion in the bedroom. ‘Are you going away?'

‘Yes, tomorrow. Somewhere up north. You'll help me decide what to take, won't you? Have a chocolate?'

Esther leaned forward holding a large box and waited while Rachel chose one. She chewed it appreciatively, legitimately silent, and gazed. She knew that Esther had no need of advice. Apparently, amazingly, for no reason, she had wanted her company: this was a fact to be thoroughly analysed later, at leisure.

Now, however, on Stan's bed under the window, Rachel lay passive and indolent, active only in one republic of her mind that watched and noted with the cool sharp tick-tick of a machine.

Dragging bright cotton skirts, tops and swimsuits from the wardrobe and drawers, Esther tried to lead the talk around to Stan. She felt that she had, after this morning, reached a new understanding of him, and she wanted someone else to appreciate him, to know all that he had overcome, and all that he tried to be. And she wanted someone to know how far he succeeded. She wanted to say words that would draw a friendly comment—anything kind—so that she could go on.

She would say: ‘If you only knew…He told me things this morning, about himself, that—I want to make it up to him so that yesterday can never happen again. And yet, he couldn't help it. If you'd seen him this morning…But, in a way, I believe that as long as he loved me, just me, I could bear it if I had to. The only thing I couldn't endure—' The mental conversation ended.

Instead of saying what was in her mind, she chattered on about nothing, in a shrill voice that Rachel marked as a noteworthy symptom of something—she balked at guessing just what. But apart from its scientific value as a symptom, this unaccustomed vivacity from one whom she had considered the epitome of gentle restraint jarred her sense of what was fitting. Behind her serious young eyes she looked coldly on the animated face and hands.

And then, as she gazed intently into the shadowed eyes, and listened to the nervous, jerky voice, Rachel experienced a sensation of profound pity—for the unknown cause of Esther's uneven spirits, for Esther's falseness to herself, for the fact that she was being studied where she expected uncritical friendliness.

Rachel despised herself. In a frenzy of repentance she fell into an attitude of innocent attention, gradually, with an effort of will, cutting off the machine, silencing it.

Esther was speaking about her family, a thing she rarely did. She talked about her father; she told Rachel how Hector had saved a girl from drowning when he was on holiday on one of the islands near the Great Barrier Reef, and later had married her. She was pleased, suddenly, to be able to mention her brothers' names without apprehension, and found in the speaking a fresh affection for them and for Rachel.