Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (23 page)

‘You would know if you had ever had a friend,' Rankin said. ‘It isn't something we have to think about.'

‘Have you?'

‘One.'

They were both silent. It didn't seem much to claim between them. One friend.

‘I'm not a cynic,' Rankin said, as if he might have been apologising. ‘One, many years ago. That's where all these came from,' he indicated the shelves of books behind him. Then he swivelled around and poured a generous helping of whiskey into both glasses, careful not to spill any. He turned and held out a glass. ‘We'll have a toast to it, Robert, I haven't been fair to you, you know.' He leaned forward and clinked glasses. ‘To friendship.'

‘Friendship,' Crofts echoed him, taking a drink and gazing vacantly in the direction of the books. He was thinking of Ida, feeling that her attention was on him: there was something critical in it, a warning maybe, or disapproval of him. He took another sip. Rankin was talking again. It was no good trying to get away from him yet. He settled back into the lumpy depths of the armchair and thought about her. Rankin's voice went on, loud then soft, reminiscing—but Crofts had ceased to listen.

Later in the evening the station owner roused himself—just before the whiskey had finished him for the night—and loudly insisted Crofts talk about his own past. The stockman found himself telling Rankin the facts, without embellishment; there was no inspired shifting of houses from the Council flats to the semi-detacheds up the hill this time. He talked for a long while, once he had started, all about himself, finding it easy, even managing to surprise himself now and then—a fresh perception of past shortcomings, a new estimate of himself as someone wiser and better, more complex in his reactions. Once he opened up a bit, he found the subject of himself an absorbing one, until he noticed that Rankin had sagged and then finally sunk into an oblivious sleep.

Crofts got up, but before he left the room he paused beside Rankin and looked down at the figure of his sleeping boss. There was something about the station owner, he decided, that he liked—something sad about him. He had not, despite his age, finally settled anything about himself; as if it didn't matter all that much and could be decided some time later. He looked vulnerable, slumped there in his old-fashioned swivel chair, surrounded by these books that were so important to him but which no one ever read any more. Worn out with whiskey and talking about it all! Crofts hesitated, then very lightly he put his hand on Rankin's hair and stroked it gently once. The impulse to do this took him by surprise.
‘You're
the mad one, not her,' he said, recalling Rankin's insane flight across the slime in the earth tank to claim the stinking carcass of the pig.

He quietly closed the door and tiptoed along the large darkened eastern verandah. He was not sure of himself in this unfamiliar part of the house, especially in the dark. He worked his way along the wall until he came to the corner. From here he saw that a light was still on in the kitchen.

On the other side of the house from Crofts, Ida was seated at the table in the enclosed western verandah. She had not long returned upstairs from having a shower. Her hair was still wet and she was wearing a loose white cotton wrap, which had fallen away from her smooth brown legs. The night was warm and she had the door open behind her for the light breeze driven down the valley from the distant storms.

Ida was munching grimly on a tasteless piece of cheese-on-toast and holding a cup of tea in her other hand. A magazine lay open on the table in front of her, but she wasn't reading it. She was deep in thought, staring at the bare wall opposite her. The remains of Janet's and Alistair's makeshift dinners still lay on the table. Janet had seemed to be waiting for her when she returned from her walk a couple of hours ago and had taken obvious delight in telling her that the stockman and her father were getting drunk together in Ward's room. Janet had then issued Ida with an ultimatum: if no one would take her to her cousin's in town she would pack her bag and walk there. Nothing would induce her to spend one more day on the station with her family. Ida had told her not to be melodramatic.

She was very disturbed by Janet's information and had gone round quietly and listened at Ward's door. She had intended only to satisfy herself that it was untrue. But when she arrived at the door to the inside room she clearly heard Crofts' voice. She listened unwillingly, and heard him recounting to Ward, confidently and at length as if they were on the closest terms, the intimate details of a childhood that, in its grimness, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the cherished upbringing he had shared with her only the previous night. Here was the life of another person altogether, someone much better suited to the squalid state of the hut than the man she had learned about. She felt betrayed and mocked. She was shocked not only by the sheer intricacy of the lies he had told her, but that he had developed this intimacy with Ward without her becoming aware of it sooner. The implications were frightening, threatening her with a terrible isolation.

She wanted to open the door and confront him, to catch him mid sentence! And she would have done it if there had been a way to avoid involving her husband. The idea that Ward might even get to know about or need to come to terms with her relationship with Crofts was utterly abhorrent to Ida. Instinctively she knew that the only hope for herself and Crofts was if they could manage to keep their feelings hidden from her family. No sane world could contain both. She was convinced of that. So she retreated and decided to wait for him.

She had taken a shower and dressed in her nicest robe. She had cooked something for herself and the children, and had opened the magazine and sought to compose her thoughts. She had done all this in order to build up a barrier against the worst possible outcome.

After the children had gone to their rooms she sat staring blankly at the pages of the magazine and tried to put out of her mind the awful possibility that Crofts had merely used her in the most flippant way possible, and that her gullibility and inexperience had done the rest. It was too late, however, to go back. She was sure of that. She could not live happily without him. As she sat there, turning all these horrible doubts and suspicions over in her mind, her life seemed to hang in the balance once again.

She was beginning to wonder if Robert might spend the night in Ward's room. Ida did not become aware of Crofts' careful approach until he was more than halfway across the kitchen. Then she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and she looked up at him. Her heart was thumping painfully in her chest and she could scarcely bear to look at him. There was nothing in his expression to reassure her.

Neither spoke. Each was waiting for a sign from the other.

After the sad spectacle of Ward Rankin in his hiding place, Ida appeared to Crofts to be almost magically healthy and beautiful. The whiskey endowed him with courage, and he decided to ask her straight out if she had made love to other stockmen. If she said she had he would say nothing, not one word, but would pack his things tonight and leave this place in the morning. He went through into the dining room. He was on the point of speaking to her when Alistair came down the passage from his room, stood in the doorway and looked at them.

Ida and Crofts both turned towards the boy.

‘What is it?' Ida asked him. He was wearing only a pair of thin cotton pyjama shorts and was standing with his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

Alistair looked from Crofts to his mother and then at the floor at his feet. He had been lying awake listening to the murmur of voices from his father's room and when they had ceased he had come out to see if the stockman had left. He saw that his mother was naked under her thin wrap and he looked at her thighs and then into her face.

Ida tugged the wrap around her and stood up. ‘Go back to bed,' she said, going over and turning Alistair around and pointing him down the passage. ‘I'll come in and see you in a minute.'

Alistair moved away from her and said, ‘What does he want now?'

‘Robert has been talking to your father. He's just leaving,' she said. She looked squarely at Crofts. He hesitated, then left the verandah, his boots clattering on the wooden steps.

seven

She knew exactly where she had to go. The creek, its banks, its big holes and bends, the old trees, the points at which each gully and tributary entered it, she knew them all. Though she had not visited the place for some years she knew exactly the overgrown alluvial flat where he was dismantling the fence. She was approaching it obliquely. She did not want him to know she was coming.

She had waited this morning until Ward, looking grim and ill, had finally driven off in the car with Janet: the girl had closed herself off completely from her family, demanding only that she go to her cousin's to wait for the start of the school year. Ida had stood with her arms folded and looked into the car and Janet had not looked up, and when it moved off she had not looked back, her head had stayed resolutely down, her attention fixed on her lap. Alistair had not even come out of the house to see his sister go.

Ida had then gone out from the homestead across the open grassland and had entered the forest where the ground began to slope more and more steeply up towards the first terrace of the ranges, a foothill to the main escarpment.

She was sweating and breathing heavily by the time she reached the point where the ground began to level off. She stood and rested for a minute, catching her breath and leaning her hand on the trunk of a pink and grey spotted gum which rose straight up out of sharp sandstone blocks for thirty metres before branching. Below her the valley spread out, the grey road two thin pencil marks meandering through the grass, winding back and forth beside the creek which was defined by the sudden dense growth of melaleucas and giant eucalypts. Her eyes followed the line of trees until she picked out in the distance the small green patches of the homestead and shed roofs, nestling together against the creek at the very edge of the dry silvery plain. She examined that area and the ground between it and herself for at least two minutes, then turned and continued along the terrace. From time to time she passed beneath sheer cliffs that dwarfed the largest trees; she crossed steep gullies that knifed deep into the side of the mountain, splitting the line of the terrace and descending in places to deep black pools of stinking water.

She was feeling nervous and it had crossed her mind that Alistair might try to follow her. Despite being called to wish his sister good luck he was still in his room with the door locked when she had left. Ward had point-blank refused to take the boy with him. It worried her. But there wasn't much she could do about it, except be careful. She felt sure she would have seen him if he had been following her and she went on now, trying to put the matter out of her mind.

It was growing hotter by the minute and, despite meaning to keep a lookout, every so often she walked straight into a thick sticky cobweb. The presence of these cobwebs seemed to increase the heat of the bush by several degrees, and their clinging elastic membranes irritated her sweating skin and blurred her vision. She swore and ripped off her straw hat as she walked into another web. The rainbow body of an armoured spider hung on the blue hatband like a jewelled brooch glinting brightly in the sunlight. She whacked the hat sharply against a bush to dislodge the insect, then rammed it back on her head and broke off a dry twig to swipe aside the webs. She walked quickly, not pausing to look around her or to examine the startling yellow and red cliffs that surged upward out of the earth in dramatic gestures, seemingly frozen at the instant of toppling into the valley, their surfaces intricate with weathering and adorned by the reptilian roots of native fig trees. Ida was carrying a small canvas satchel over her shoulder in which she had put two oranges and a plastic bottle of water, but even though she soon developed a thirst she did not touch the contents of the satchel—she walked quickly with a sense of urgency and couldn't have enjoyed a rest.

After a little over an hour she descended thirty metres or more and walked out onto the flat crown of a bluff, which dominated the level ground below like the prow of a beached ship. She was careful in her movements as she neared the lip of the bluff, going down on her hands and knees and inching forwards the last few metres. From the edge she looked down on the dark green crowns of thousands of black wattle trees which covered the flat like a sown crop.

She wanted to observe Robert, calmly and in her own time. She wanted to watch him move and to see what he did. She wanted to see what he was like when he did not think she was near him. If she could, she wanted to find a clue, some evidence that would help her believe he really was the person he had seemed to be when they were alone together. She would not deceive him. She intended to confront him and tell him she had spied on him.

There was no sign of him, however, down there among the wattles. Beyond the wattle trees she could see the surface of the creek, a large clear pool tucked into the bend beneath a flat shelf of pale sunlit sandstone. It was a permanent hole that never changed, even when periodic floods gouged new directions for the creek. Here the water ran against the sandstone mountain and could do nothing but scour the rock. She examined the area beneath her carefully, listening for the sounds of him working. All she could hear was the constant screaming of the cicadas, a shrill vibration which came from every direction.

She made her way down the side of the bluff and emerged onto the flat. Here she was beneath the crown of the wattles and could see quite a long way through them. The fence where she was standing was intact. She climbed over the slack wire, making it squeak shrilly against the old hole in the post as she pressed it down. She paused and waited. Nothing. She went forward through the trees, on the alert, afraid he might be standing still somewhere and detect her presence before she saw him. Then she glimpsed the red cabin of the truck through the trees. She watched it for some time. No movement. Not a sound. Slowly she approached it. He was not in the truck and none of the tools had been removed from it. She looked about her, wondering what was going on. It was as if he had never been here. She had expected to find a worksite.