The Following (17 page)

Then the four jackaroos – Tim Airey, Geoff Wouldhave, Norman Woollacott and Bill Greathead – were invited into the Arcade for snooker and table tennis. They played a set. Kyle and Ross Devlin then played their weekly match.

Kyle, almost a cripple, was unbeatable with the celluloid ball. He stood back from the centre of the table flicking returns to Devlin without apparent effort. The jackaroos applauded. At snooker it was the same, runs of balls into every corner.

Ross Devlin hated the way Kyle played him to a standstill while young Bill Greathead, or the Greathead equivalent of the day, going back to when Ross started with Kyle, snorted, ‘Yo, ho, ho the boss!’ every time a ball ricocheted.

Ross kept thinking:
‘The boss’ – Jesus, who is it really runs this dump? I’ll show who it is, by the living Christ I will
. And so he would, by means of a kick up the arse or an open-palmed clip to the ear of the likes of young Greathead, and Kyle Morrison would know nothing about it, that Kyle would be game to admit when he saw, in the morning, a thick nose, a pair of wobbly eyes trailing out from the cook hut.

Elisabeth said, concerning Ross Devlin, ‘I have never seen an unhappier man in all my life. Do something about him, Kyle, won’t you?’

‘Everything I’ve tried . . .’ Kyle trailed off. ‘There’s his manner . . .’ He tried harder. ‘His manner of agreement, it’s always so . . . I ask him to chip the jackaroos – very well – he belts them.’

‘Get him to ask his girl here.’

‘His girl?’ said Kyle.

‘You might find it hard. It’s the Milburn lass.’

Kyle licked a finger and ate up a crumb from the breakfast table.

He knew it of course. It wasn’t the old Milburn witch who had Inverarity’s nuts in a twist over title deeds; it was the young Milburn witch – a country town she-cat on sticky asphalt dancing the ants in the pants bop-a-loola. He knew her. Knew her by sight, had seen her clutching a bottle of beer, which she shook with her thumb over the neck and sprayed at passing Lotharios as they cruised by with their side windows rolled down, asking for a poke.

‘What are you looking at, you old fart,’ she yelled at Kyle, or was it the man on the other side of the road, or was it the man looking out from the doors of the bank or someone.

I
T WAS MIDWEEK WHEN THE
mailman drove up to the garden gate blowing a cranky horn. Elisabeth took delivery of a bundle of letters and parcels under an arbour of Persian roses, watered by washing-up slops.

‘Darling,’ Elisabeth said when Kyle came in and was settled in his armchair, a big Scotch within reach. ‘Darling, good news.’

Kyle lowered the Sydney
Bulletin
, which had once been Bounder’s bible, the only reading matter that counted countrywide – but now material ran that seemed to confound the understanding – poems that were miserably withered on the page, short stories alluding to matters that should never be spoken about publicly in words never before seen in print.

Elisabeth smoothed a letter on her knee. ‘Powys is coming on Sunday,’ she said, ‘and bringing a friend.’

‘Powys coming,
good
.’

A recent
Bulletin
correspondent, writing as ‘Literature Lover’, had attacked Powys’s novels with a vehemence that flushed Kyle with affection:

‘Polysyllables and sentences over three hundred words long, hardly any commas and no paragraph breaks try the patience. A propensity for pages with hardly a crack for ordinary understanding marks the demanding style. It is like being never allowed to leave a room – a mode of mental strangulation.’

Except both Kyle and Ross Devlin agreed – something they agreed on! – that after struggling with Powys you found a page, a chapter, and the rest of a book opened out, until, a golden glimmer on the horizon, Inverarity station rose into view under the fictional name of Blue Horizons.

Few reached that point. Rosemary MacKinlay, Powys’s own sister, barely had, except to admit there were very few spelling mistakes in her brother’s scribbles. Brian MacKinlay said he wouldn’t bother opening one of Powys’s tomes but liked having one as a doorstop. Elisabeth, though she loved Powys, preferred books soothing to sentimental hopes, and so she ought, having lived her life’s dreams down to the bone as a Morrison daughter-in-law.

As a writer, Powys Wignall was everything his relation Bounder Morrison was not. He turned things inside, not out. Powys was published in England. Bounder had never been published there. Powys avoided commas! Their lack was intoxication to Kyle – a comma stung.

What Rosemary hated most about her brother’s books, she said, could not be expressed – too much of one thing, too little of another. Then too much of everything altogether that should never be revealed concerning details of Wignall and Morrison life.

‘Example,’ she then liked to add. Who needed to know about Gerald Albury answering Maude Grout’s plea for a personal loan that she’d use to buy into the newly formed ‘Blue Horizons Pastoral Company’ without telling Gerald a word about it until it was signed, sealed and delivered? And another thing – what sort of a name was Grout? Maude Grout crying poor to Albury when he returned from England aghast at what had been done by her. Who needed to know such things, all spelled out as in a court of law, with only the names changed? It made Rosemary feel naked and exposed until she realised that nobody was really reading her brother’s books, or nobody who counted.

At the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate Trustees’ meetings Kyle was asked by national clever dicks, ‘How’s that flaming literary genius, your mother’s cousin, coming along?’

Kyle boasted nothing, said little, but read and re-read Powys’s books. He was proud of being a character in the novels – Partridge in
Lenders’ Books
, Milthorpe in
No Ring of Bells
. It went back to the shared life, the relation of boy to man on the north-west plains.

Kyle looked blank if anyone came close to suggesting it, as Ross Devlin had more than once, craftily or desperately or feelingly or wantingly maintaining practically the only common ground between them. Neither Kyle nor Devlin had ever been able to find a factual error or an inaccurate observation or a line that was not the truth, even if not their own truth, exactly, except somehow enhancing or upraising their feeling of where they fitted into a greater scheme of things than the trudging, repetitive everyday life they lived.

Ross Devlin under the spell of Inverarity horizons never questioned why he’d turned his back on his father’s wish to make him a builder and gone bush under the influence of the MacKinlays after he’d done with the Catholic Brothers. Inverarity soared to night skies telling the story of the universe. You didn’t need a prayer book to tell you that. It was in Powys’s words a prophecy of belonging.

Ross rankled when a review of
No Ring of Bells
in the
London Times
defined jackaroos as ‘cowboys’. It was reported in Australian papers and Ross took up his pen.

‘I was struck,’ he wrote in an aerogram to the
Times
with a hand curved around the page like a schoolboy in exams, ‘by your reviewer’s ignorance, sir. The equivalent of “cowboy” in Australian is not “jackaroo” but “station hand” or “ringer”. Mr Powys Wignall, who is from the ruling class of this country, could only have fitted that role by a considerable act of slumming. More like a cowboy is the check-shirted, Stetson-hatted young fellow, sitting up on the rails watching the rodeo and most likely of Aboriginal race.’

Ross lingered over that last sentence on account of that cousin of a ringer, Jenny Milburn, who was, it must be asserted, white as he was or at worst coffee-cream. Having done his nuts over Jenny, he’d moved into the phase of convincing her it was for life. It would be, anyway, if he could cure her restlessness by settling her on the Swampland Block. He would anyway try if justice ran its course.

The letter was not published. Neither editor nor reviewer responded. Ross pored over his copy, wondering what was wrong with it – or else with Australia, when an Australian could not get his point across.

I
N THE ARCADE AT MAIL
time the anticipation was thrilling.

‘
When
is Powys coming?’ said Kyle.

‘Sunday,’ said Elisabeth.

‘But, darling,’ said Kyle, ‘Sunday? There’s no Sunday’s train, and Powys won’t drive.’

He said ‘won’t drive’ in a winning tone – good old Powys, how Lizzie loved Powys too; they were one on him. It wasn’t so much ‘won’t drive’ as ‘it kills him to drive because of his war wound and the trouble it gives’. They said that to people, drawing a line around Powys, making him their own.

Elisabeth re-smoothed Powys’s letter across her jodhpured knee. It was several pages long.

‘ “The friend can drive like Gelignite Jack Murray and change a wheel in a jiffy,” ’ she read.

‘He’ll be making use of him,’ said Kyle with an affectionate groan.

‘Darling, it’s a she. He’s bringing Margaret Poole.’

Now Kyle threw his head back and laughed and laughed – now he really was delighted and threw the
Bulletin
into a corner.

Margaret Poole – the daughter of Elisabeth’s honeymoon friend, Maggie – working-class people – Elisabeth’s salt-of-the-earth New Zealanders – just the idea of them balancing the Australian squatter class and mongrel hayseed voting bloc of the north-west plains that Elisabeth had thrown her lot in with by marrying Kyle.

Last year Margaret had crossed the Tasman and started work as a
Women’s Weekly
journalist living in Sydney and getting herself known. It had been a correspondence relationship till then. They’d met for the first time in April, when Margaret interviewed Kyle about lizards and snakes.

The interview was conducted at Taronga Zoo where the reptile keepers welcomed Kyle. Margaret’s article appeared in the
Weekly
with a pulled-focus shot of Kyle with a tiger snake fang seemingly flicking his nose, about to strike, and he’d never looked happier except on trophy day at the ‘Dryblows’, or when slamming Ross Devlin in the teeth with a ping-pong ball.

Kyle leaned forward in his chair and looked at Elisabeth imploringly.

‘Her chappie is out of the picture?’ he said.

‘Darling, how would I know?’

‘Ah,’ said Kyle. ‘Most probably you would know.’

Elisabeth treasured the moments when Kyle gleamed about the eyes and mouth, and yes, even if it was a young woman who gave him that pleasure. Even if it was jealousy of a louring, pessimistic young man by the name of Alan Ward, who was Margaret’s friend, indeed a whole lot more, when she came to Sydney. Ward had decamped for the old country, leaving Margaret hurt. There was evidence for this: Margaret wrote in the first person singular, no longer pluralised, and she wrote more often.

Kyle leaned forward in his chair with an openly roused look that was as good with him as recovery from illness. It was such a sad, horsey, somehow affronted face, normally tense and bothered. It needed to be shaken out of itself. Social arrangements did the trick as well as his squamata collection or parties where women in skinny jeans danced the Twist.

‘Where shall we put her, Mar-gar-et?’ said Kyle, working each syllable over. He was glad that the director’s cottage would be in use by Rosemary and Brian.

‘She can stay in the house, in the east bedroom. Powys can have the Arcade,’ said Elisabeth.

‘Yes, I thought that,’ said Kyle in a tone implying consideration of a woman’s reputation and of putting shackles on a man.

Matchmaking Powys was a pursuit of Elisabeth’s that Kyle supported, but linking Powys to Margaret Poole made him uneasy. He could not have said why, but thought of the politics – blue-chip Powys, pinko-swayed Margaret – and thought of the age gap, income gap, class gap, and thought,
I will show her the Swampland Block, just the two of us.

She was a slender, vital, black-pigtailed young woman of the kind who’d look great like a Red Indian girl on a paint pony. Kyle started thinking about which horse to give her, a gallop home in a lather of sweat and a cold shower under the tankstand. It was a fact of the matter that he was harmlessly, ditheringly gone rather sweet on her.

‘Powys in the Arcade,’ he said. ‘Margaret in the front bedroom.’ He gave his cracked lips a dampening of Scotch.

Elisabeth had been thinking of sleeping the visitors in the same bed, or of anyway making the offer. Premarital sex was not what it used to be – she meant, it was having its day – and she’d many times thought, while living her constrained life,
Why on earth not?

When Powys brought Beverley, his English bride, to Inverarity after the war, there’d been nights of shrieks and awful fights, someone falling from bed – Powys pushed, no doubt, by that unhappy woman – and metallic objects, guessed to be jewellery, hitting a wall. In recent years Powys’s letters addressed to Elisabeth confided his yearnings and told of erratic, short-lived alliances and evenings with dull, respectful hopes, some of them match-made by Elisabeth.

Thinking that disappointment would fade past their thirties, when it was accepted they could not have children, here was Kyle flushed and Elisabeth animated and busy at keeping disappointment at bay, and both of them stirred by talk of Powys, this early middle-aged man who was like a son to them. His visits were treated as homecomings. Inverarity was his when the world was young, in the prized interlude just before the war. It had been snatched from him (he who could afford it, if he’d been told in time) by Rosemary MacKinlay’s shenanigans, and Kyle’s shame. It was why Kyle had not told him, not written to him in England and warned of the move – deprived as owner and restored as manager, a transition managed not by the new regime so much as by Elisabeth’s soothing hand.

Menus were planned, excursions proposed, neighbours telephoned and asked if they would like to come over. ‘
Powys
is coming – with a friend – bring some 45s – we’ll have a “hop”.’

There was no stopping Kyle now, usually so reticent.

The cover sheet would be removed from the piano. The novels in their artful, lettered dust jackets would be fanned across the coffee table. The stereophonic player would be checked for function and tidied of books and magazines, a pile grown over the dusty months. The 16 mm projector would be stood on its telescopic legs and a painting lifted from the wall to make a screen space striped with tongue-and-groove verticals.