Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (26 page)

She did not have long to wait.

The minute Crofts drove into the shed in the truck Rankin went down the steps almost at a run and for the next half hour or so she heard him talking non-stop—as if he were meeting with a good deal of resistance—to the stockman. She leaned out of the kitchen window but could catch nothing of the sense of what was being said. Either the chatter of the kitchen garden birds or a resounding clap of thunder exactly coincided with the key words in the one-sided conversation. Bizarre as it was, she had to admit from what she had gathered that Ward appeared to be attempting to convince Robert of the value of a good education. Then, to her further amazement, Ward and Robert came in through the gate and went under the house together, from where they emerged a minute or two later carrying between them the collection of things that Ward had placed there earlier. She watched with disbelief as they headed out the garden gate and down the path towards the stockman's quarters. A genuine sense of dread overcame her that something unusually grotesque was about to be attempted by her husband.

‘He can't possibly be going to live over there with him!' she said aloud, standing at the window, visualising Ward sitting up in bed in the hut reading aloud while Robert supposedly learned to appreciate the beauty of Keats' poetry, or some such thing. She found nothing amusing in this image. She knew, however, that for Ward nothing could ever be quite that simple. Something else, something far more complicated and devious was being hatched by him, she was certain of it. Whatever it was, it closely involved Robert and excluded her completely. She remembered saying, ‘Well, you'll just have to humour him,' when Robert had talked to her about his difficulty with Ward wanting his company; and she regretted the advice now. It had been given without any thought that it might ever seriously be needed.

During the following days it became apparent to Ida that Ward had no intention of living in the hut with Robert; but what he did intend remained a mystery to her. Meals became a torment for her, promising her the chance of seeing Robert and denying her the opportunity of speaking with him alone. The best they were able to manage was the occasional furtive exchange of an anguished and questioning glance.

Had Rankin not intervened, the storms would have prevented Crofts from taking the truck out to his non-existent job on the wire anyway. As it was, the wild weather was perfect for Rankin's intentions. Each morning after breakfast he went with Crofts to the stockman's quarters where, except for meals, they spent the entire day and much of the night. Left on her own in the house, with Alistair prowling around inside, and the roaring tropical storms outside, Ida had little to distract her from imagining what sort of ‘progress' Ward's project might be making.

It was late on the fifth evening, almost midnight. She had decided that no matter how long she had to wait she would stay up until after Ward and Alistair were finally asleep in their beds, and would then go over and see Robert.

She was frightened and had started to feel pushed for time.

She had begun to sense that there was a limit to the period during which she could sit around feeling frustrated by this situation. She knew she had to regain the initiative. She waited until one o'clock in the morning, and still there was no sign of Ward returning. She was fully dressed and had been sitting on her bed for hours, listening, dripping with sweat in the gluey heat. She felt sick and had a sore throat coming on, and knew it was due to her anxiety about what they could possibly be doing together over there. Her earlier fears about whether or not she could trust Robert had been stirred up again during the past five days by her absolute lack of information about what was going on between him and her husband—she felt mean and unworthy for letting it establish a grip on her, but she could not suppress a niggling suspicion that Robert had been obscurely involved with Ward all along. She realised with horror that Robert's beauty must always have appealed greatly to her husband, in a forlorn and desperate way. She could just see it, Ward being moved by Robert to some kind of hopeless comparison with himself, something tortuous and secretive—an agonised preoccupation.

Once she had thought of this Ida began to detect, scattered here and there over the past few months, indications of the special interest she was now convinced that Ward had been showing in Robert. She was amazed that she had not noticed these things at the time. She saw, or thought she saw, hints of the tentative development of this latest ‘project' in Ward's mind. An image arose in her own mind of Ward stripped to the waist bending over Robert cutting his hair in preparation for the fights, an image that now suggested the embrace of wrestlers or lovers in its intimacy. At the time she had been too preoccupied with her own fantasies to notice such things. This realisation embarrassed her. She felt her own dreams cheapened by their apparent similarity with Ward's and she tried at once to remove any possible comparison. She reminded herself that she had not noticed Ward's interest in Robert for one very good reason. Hadn't her attention also been distracted by Ward's extraordinary concern for Janet's virginity with the arrival on the station of such a beautiful young man?

She laughed aloud. If anyone could take care of themselves sexually—and she had always thought this—it was Janet. The girl possessed a great natural confidence in herself and her body, an arrogance even, akin to her father's. It was a confidence that Ida herself had never had. It was not easy to admit, but it was true all the same. It was one of the reasons she and Janet had never got on, had never become friends and shared their dreams and secrets with each other as mothers and daughters are supposed to do—the truth was, Janet had always considered herself superior to her mother in the practice of womanhood.

Ida was sick of thinking about it all. She stood up and went over to look out of the window. She was sick of thinking about it all but she couldn't stop the helter-skelter of her mind, her thoughts running on, tripping over each other. She was avoiding something and she knew it. She leaned on the windowsill and watched the brilliant display of lightning across the stormy landscape. ‘I should never have had Ward's children,' she said quietly, only slightly surprised by the ease with which the conclusion presented itself to her, as if it were something of no great consequence. They have not prevented me from being alone. Ward is alone too, she thought, enclosed in a perpetual isolation with himself. The idea horrified her.

She looked at her watch. ‘We shall have to leave this place,' she said aloud to her reflection in the mirror. The thought of it made her go cold inside. The idea of such a move frightened her. It was what she had been avoiding. She turned and looked out the window again and tried to think of herself and Robert walking together on the streets of a coastal town somewhere, Gympie or Rockhampton, or maybe going far away, to one of the southern cities, Sydney or Melbourne. She couldn't picture it. She had stayed and had given birth to Ward's children rather than leave these Highlands. She envied people who could come and go as they pleased. She envied Janet and Gil.

‘Quarter past one,' she murmured, looking at her watch again.

She switched out her light and went down the passage. She listened at Alistair's bedroom door until she was satisfied she could hear him mumbling and moving around on his bed. Then she left the house. She went down the back steps and started along the path to the hut. The ground was sodden and every few seconds was lit by a flash of lightning, followed by absolute blackness. She was forced to pause after each flash and grope around to regain her bearings. During one of the longer interludes of darkness she noticed a strip of yellow light under the door of the hut, and she tried to keep this lined up squarely in front of her. She had not thought of a pretext to explain her presence if she were discovered by Ward. She was not completely clear about what she was doing. She could not stomach the thought of being in competition with her husband for Robert's affections. The possibility horrified her. She had to
do
something. She had to settle things in her own mind or go mad.

Thinking she was treading on a soggy tussock of grass she put all her weight onto the cringing body of one of the dogs, which had dragged itself to the length of its chain and was now whining and snuffling at her feet. It squealed once. In her hurried attempt to get off the wretched squirming animal she lost her balance and came down heavily, her outstretched hand slicing across the sharp tin of its kennel. She stifled a cry and clutched her arm, rolling clumsily onto her side in the mud. The dog was licking her face in a frenzy of gratitude, and excruciating stabs of pain were shooting up her arm. At that moment the door to the stockman's quarters opened. Ward came out and stood in the light of the verandah. He was followed by Robert. The two of them stayed there laughing and talking in low tones for a minute. Then Ward put his hand on Robert's arm in a gesture of easy affection and stepped off the verandah, saying, ‘See you tomorrow.' He came along the path towards Ida and she lay still, clutching her wrist, her mouth closed tightly against the urgent, probing tongue of the dog, which stank abominably of the carrion Ward had fed it earlier.

‘You can see okay then?' Crofts asked.

‘I know my way,' Rankin called back cheerfully. He walked within two metres of her without noticing her. He was quietly whistling a tune that she had often heard him sing. She thought it might be called
Spring Song.
An impulse to leap out of the grass and confront him passed through her mind. She could
feel
the insanity of his mind, of his way of life. And now it had drawn her in. There couldn't be any change in the pattern of his life. It was compulsive, self-perpetuating.

You couldn't stand and fight it, you had to get away beyond the reach of its influence—as Janet had done, it suddenly occurred to her. She could feel all this and she understood it, despite his cheerful good spirits. She required no evidence; she could imagine how he would have been charming and generous and good-humoured with Robert, and how he would have constructed in these past few days a monstrous deception, fooling himself as well as the stockman. She knew that at this very moment Robert would be thinking him a responsive friend.

She lay in agony by the side of the path, fending off the disgusting attentions of the dog. It was clear to her that to go on at this moment and see Robert would be hopeless, would only confirm the impression left by Ward. How could she stand before him, dripping blood and mud and stinking dog saliva, she asked herself, and explain anything to her own advantage? She was in tears. She slowly crawled away from the dog into the deeper darkness next to the wall of the shed, and waited there until she heard the screen door close behind Ward—Robert had already gone back into the hut and closed his door—and then she got to her feet and began to pick her way carefully through the tussocks and weeds towards the house. Another heavy shower of rain was beating down. The big round drops of water splashed coldly against her damp skin and made her shiver. She felt shocked, as though she had just been beaten in a vicious fight with Ward.

She clutched her throbbing hand to her chest and, standing still in the pitch black with the rain pelting down on her, she waited for the next flash of lightning to show her where the path was. She longed to see some wonderfully simple way of ridding herself of her husband; if she could have imagined a way of killing him and of getting away with it, she would have done it. Everything that had occurred between herself and her husband during the past fourteen years had brought her to this one point—her fear that he would defeat her and Robert, as well as himself. They had lived, she realised, before Robert's arrival, parallel but separate lives, in which each had left to the other his or her own particular territory of choice; it was not a civilised resolution of their conflicts, as they might have let themselves believe, but a completely false state of existence in which their potential for deadly conflict had been inert so long as they had not desired the same thing. Their underlying distrust and hatred of each other had been there all the time. She shivered. No lightning came and the rain was getting heavier.

She went forward, lifting a foot high in the air, feeling around with her toe for the ground. She knew that she and Robert had to get away from him, by whatever means. But she was aware of the need to be very careful and to plan everything properly. She had to free them both, by some neat stratagem that would take Ward by surprise and defeat him once and for all.

She placed her foot carefully down on the wet ground, wobbled unsteadily for a second, then moved forward another step. She had begun to think effectively. A plan had already begun to suggest itself to her, and she at once felt less panicked and more reassured of her ability to deal with the situation. How right she had been, she congratulated herself now, on insisting to Robert that he keep their relationship hidden from Ward. Robert would have to give a week's notice before leaving. She would then quietly begin to put her affairs in order and, when she was ready, she would tell Ward that she had decided to go to the coast for a holiday after all, to go and see Janet perhaps, and would join Robert at a prearranged place. Success, she asserted to herself, would be a matter of staying calm and of moving one step at a time. Whatever happened it was crucial that Ward not be forewarned of their plans. The lightning flashed and she saw the garden gate directly ahead of her. She moved towards it confidently, delighted that her instinct had been right.

She collected a bowl of warm water, some clean cloths, ointment and a bandage from the kitchen, and she took them to her room, closing the door. She sat on the bed with the bowl on a chair and she examined the cut on her hand. Neither of them was suited to earning a living in town. And there would be no other money. The cut was deep and ragged and it began to bleed freely again as soon as she started to clean it. She observed her hand as if it belonged to someone else, not permitting herself to react to the pain. The idea of leaving the Highlands forever was billowing in her mind, foisting unwelcome details on her: all the difficulties they would have to face.