Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 8

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Cabell confided an idea to Mrs Todd. "In two or three years' time I'll send you home to England with the girl. I've got a sister down in Dorset. This is no place for a girl to grow up in."

So Mrs Todd lived in hope. She endured her yearly dose of blight, like grains of hot sand in the eyes, her yearly dose of the shakes, the appalling fecundity of little black ants, rats, flies, and snakes. More difficult to bear was the malice of Emma.

"That's nice lace you've got on your dress there," Emma said, pointing down, and Mrs Todd looked and saw a band of fleas, two inches wide, round the hem of her tarlatan skirt.

But she endured the fleas, consoling her loneliness in this outlandish place with rambling stories of the way she had walked in the fields around Hampstead when she was a girl, picking buttercups in May. In England it was always May.

Harriet clung to her. Then she clung to Harriet, when five years had passed and Cabell, sooty from a bushfire, stinking of foot-rotting sheep, of the sweat of horses, stopped at the door of the schoolroom to watch Harriet's little hands struggling up and down the keyboard of the piano and say, "In two years' time I reckon you ought to be about ready to go home to your Aunt Harriet with Mrs Todd here."

Harriet sat on the high piano stool with her red-stockinged legs dangling and looked down at her hands in her lap. She had her mother's trick of submission behind a dead face. But Cabell saw only her brown eyes and straight nose like his mother's--her difference from the rest. Two years. Twenty-four months more. He picked her up and kissed her on the lax mouth. "In ten years it won't be me kissing you but some flash young new-chum, eh?"

When he was gone Mrs Todd burst into tears. "He promised--he promised . . ." She did not change perceptibly, but by the end of the year no longer worried the boys about holding their forks too far down and the way they said "school," and "girl," about the fleas on her skirt and the rats nesting in her boxes. She gave up laundering her stiff tarlatan and her innumerable white petticoats, and, as though only the starch in them had supported her, collapsed into a shape, like a cottage loaf, of three super-imposed spheres of skirt, bust, and damp face.

She drank a lot of tea.

"You drink too much tea," Cabell told her. "That's what's the matter with you. Look in the pot and you'll see what your insides are like."

"It isn't all tea, Papa," Geoffrey said, ingratiating Cabell's indifference towards his sons. "There's a lot of Hollands in it too."

"What's that?"

"Mummy gives it to her. I saw."

Mrs Todd cowered. "A lady needs something to sustain her."

"Even a lady," Emma said, "that's been brought in to teach the children their mother eats like a bullocky." And a rare smile moved her lips, silky and dry like the skin on an old scar.

So Mrs Todd departed next morning, protesting feebly the deceit and injustice of Cabell. Finally he lost his patience, picked her up, bundled her head first into the buggy beside Sambo, then lashed the horses across the rump and sent them careering down the hill. The buggy skidded, lurched, rattled over the bridge, and carried Mrs Todd, ludicrously clutching her hat in one hand, Sambo with the other, out of sight in the scrub.

Harriet went away from the window quickly and sat down in the corner of the schoolroom pretending to sew her sampler. But she watched the door out of the corner of her eyes and her hands shook. When her father came in, still angry, slamming the door, she started to cry, with a detached, uncontrollable passion. It was not for Mrs Todd that she cried. It was the sound of Mrs Todd's dress ripping from waist to hem in the scuffle, the thud of Cabell's whip-handle on the horses' ribs, and the wild scamper of hoofs across the bridge which filled her with a sick fear. That image of her father abandoned in violence would never be wiped out.

"Harriet, little Harriet! What's the matter?" He bent over to pick her up, but her body stiffened in his arms, her teeth clicked together, and she vomited.

Emma nursed her for a fortnight. When Cabell came near the bed she edged towards her mother. "Go away," Emma said, "you frighten the child."

"By Christ," he said, "don't you try to turn that child against me."

"Don't be a fool. Go away. You only make her worse."

He dashed off to Brisbane to get another governess, and the air in the house seemed suddenly easier to breathe.

James ran wild. He was ten years old, with a high-boned face, freckled and gay, the Cabell nose and jaw, and the mischievous, head-erect stare of a young wild bull. Sitting at the window of the schoolroom through the dusty afternoons he used to see Larry riding about the valley. He wanted to be like Larry, who could stick any buckjumper, shoot a kangaroo from the saddle, or jerk a steer off its feet with one gigantic throw.

He had soon become sick and tired of Mrs Todd's maunderings and the futile labour of copying out her pothooks and hangers. The smells in the valley excited him, the smell of the grass burning, the smell of cattle. When the rain, breaking the long dry season, had departed, the sky was a hazy saffron-blue, like a soft plush cushion in which the whitewashed, red-roofed buildings of the station had embedded themselves. The shallow water lay about in sheets of broken mirror with the grass growing out of it and a strange, reversed world inhabited by dim birds. In the midday heat a musky smell came up from the flocks of glossy ibises standing motionless in the water. From relief after the long months of dust and heat and the weeks of rain and mud he wanted to rush out and throw himself on the ground, alive with new grass--feathery wild parsnip, sweet marjoram, that scented his hands, pigweed with sappy, red stalks. His voice was hysterical. He wanted to chatter to his father, press himself close to his mother. But the self-absorbed lives of an adult world excluded him. The personality of his father looming grimly over their uneasy meals, of his mother remote and busy among clattering pans, brooms, and torrid ovens, of Mrs Todd dankly obsessed by her hard fate, kept him in rebellious submission.

A day would come when the black shadows in the scrub and the lace of sunlight on the lagoon at the Three Mile were irresistible. Mrs Todd would look everywhere, silently for fear of letting Cabell know that he was wagging it, and not find him. He was wandering about in the bush looking for honey, or cat-fishing with Sambo, listening to Sambo's stories of horses and dogs and blacks.

"Oughta see them myalls down the coast fishin'. Got two first fingers off. Tie a bit of hair round them till they rot, then put their dook in a bull-ants' nest and let the ants eat the flesh. Better to hold the lines with they reckon." Sambo spat in the yellow water. "Aw, but they ain't proper myalls. Oughta seen them me 'n' yer old man shot. Burned 'em after--and the grease run out like butter . . ."

"My father must've been--fierce," James said.

"Fierce? By gum, if he went in a paddock with a sapling in his hand all the horses'd jump the fence. That's how fierce he was. Just oughta see him stoush a bloke!"

"Can he fight?"

"Pity you wasn't here to see when he put Black Jem, the bushranger, in his bunk and when he stoushed that bloke M'Govern."

"Who was he?"

"A bloke." Sambo pulled his line in and baited it again slowly. But his lower lip overlapped the upper for some time after it had helped to solve the difficulty of making a lump of damper paste stick on a hook. "A funny bloke," he said. "Come up from the south and started bossin' yer old man round. Bossed me too! Then he mizzled."

"Did they have a fight?"

Sambo frowned. "Of course. Bloke don't mizzle in such a hurry he leaves a three-year-old chestnut behind without being hoofed out. Mind you, no one actually seen it. Night the old humpy burnt down it was, and yer old man was just gettin' better from bein' blinded. Fell in a bush they reckoned. That was funny too. Never heard of yer old man fallin' offera horse before. Funny the way he looked when we see that cove without any face down Ningpo way that night just after. And funniest of the lot a bloke leavin' that chestnut . . ." He was silent for some time, pondering. Then he shook his head and abandoned a mystery for an indisputable truth. "Chestnut's best kinda horse. Gimme a chestnut any day."

These stories scared James. All at once the glitter of the day was tarnished over. "I better go home," he said. He sneaked into the house and hid in the room where he slept with Geoffrey, heard Emma setting the table for dinner, Cabell washing his hands behind the kitchen, heard them sitting down. Silence, except for the flies and the drip-drop-drip of water in the earthenware filter.

Then Geoffrey spoke up. "Miss Todd couldn't find Jimmie this morning. But I know where he is."

Nobody encouraged him.

"He's hiding in the bedroom, if you want to know."

"Sssh-shhh! Eat your dinner," Mrs Todd said hastily.

It was not that they expected Cabell to get up and belt James. He did not expect that himself exactly. He didn't know what he expected. He was terrified of a violence--rumoured, sensed in the cringing of men when Cabell shouted--as vague and terrible as the past from which came Sambo's stories. The ugly scar on Cabell's face, the patch on his eye, the other eye that seemed to concentrate all the light that had once been in two, the ruckles of purple flesh on his arm where a fire had scorched him, were a hint of this past and of the terrific spirit which had endured it. But it was hidden away, buckled down, and that was what frightened James most of all, for Cabell, biting his teeth on a retort to Emma, thrusting his fist in his pocket when Larry answered him back, seemed to be buckling down the devil in his heart.

All day he hid about the house. The smell of the meat roasting for tea made a painful hole in his stomach, but he was afraid to come out and get the food Emma left about for him. He was hiding among the flower-pots at the end of the veranda now. The sun was going down. Monaghan was bringing a mob of sheep across the flat: the yap of the dogs and his shrill voice wailing "Hoy-hey," breaking down into a rumble of bass snarls at the dogs, "Gedaway back, Blue. Gedaway back, blast yeh," rose clearly through the froth of noises marking the end of the day--the rhythmic creak-creak, creak-creak of a wagon coming through the scrub, Sambo and Larry bailing up a wild cow by putting a noose over its horns and hauling it in on the windlass, the calf's frantic moaning, the rattle of buckets, the tame magpie whistling in the garden, cockatoos squabbling like bad-tempered old women, the dry patter-patter of sheep on dusty ground, the clink of trace chains in the yard, cicadas, a stir of breeze in the trees like leaves turning in a book, voices. . . . This excited chatter of men and animals and birds finishing another day swirled round the house but did not enter it, as though the place had a hard shell to protect the soft kernel of its silence, spongy, rotten, yet ever threatening to give forth some monstrous, unexpected foliage.

Cabell came up the steps and settled into the rocking-chair with a sigh. An oven door slammed in the kitchen and James heard the clatter of his mother's big, greenhide boots in the passage.

She stood in the doorway watching the back of Cabell's head. The wrinkle-wires jerked in her face.

"Well, what d'you want?"

The silence, that always seemed about to burst and give forth some rank growth, like the yellow nut-grass that sprang up in the semidarkness under the house, clotted around them.

James shivered. "They're going to have a row," he thought and felt the earth tremble under him as if its pillars were being shaken.

"Well?" Cabell turned in his chair. "What the devil are you standing there for?"

The sun flamed behind the silhouette of his skull for a moment, as though trying to keep itself in the sky against the slow, pitiless will of the night closing in upon it from the east, then sank into the hills in an impotent fury of crimson light which left his face ashen and pinched. The wrinkle-wires relaxed and Emma laughed abruptly. "Oh, well, you can't go on for ever--no more than the sun can. And you can't take it all with you--that's certain."

"Bah!" he turned away.

She laughed again, without mirth. "You had your chance and you passed it. Now it's too late, see. Too late."

"Stop your clack!"

"I won't stop my clack," she flared up. "You seem to forget that I'm not here on charity. I earned it. And Larry's my son. To hell with your fancies."

"To hell with you," he shouted, but lowered his voice and began to argue, waving his hand against the washed-out blue of the western sky. "Christ, it didn't give you a lien over my thoughts and feelings for the rest of my life. I'm grateful for what you did that night--whatever it was--but . . ."

"But--be damned. I'm not talking about liens and gratitude. I'm talking of what is. You know what happened. I know what happened. And nobody else knows."

The cow went on moaning bleakly for its calf.

"And so what?"

Emma was a long time answering. "Nobody wants to die in their bed more than I do," she said at last, "but Larry's my son. He's nearly twenty-seven. It's time you gave him a chance. If you throw away what's his by right--what I earned for him that night . . . Oh, I don't know what I'd do."

He jumped up and the chair began to rock, with an increasing tempo, as if moved by the vibrations of his anger--then stopped. The bodiless shadow jerked a cardboard arm across the dwindling arc of light in the sky. "Nonsense, woman. You're obsessed. Larry'll get his due. Why not?"

"Obsessed?" Emma sniffed. "And you?"

"The run's been going to ruin and now I'm putting things shipshape again. Is that anything to make a song about?"

"And the next thing you'll be up to your neck in debt with the place overstocked, thinking to make a fortune and serve some barmy idea you've got about Harriet. Then there'll be a drought and where will Larry be? Or Harriet or anybody?"

"You talk as if I didn't make this place."

"You'd've made it different if I'd had a say. And now I have."

"You can mind your own business."

"That's what I'm doing. So watch yourself, Derek Cabell. You're not the only one with notions on this earth."

The darkness came in from the east like a tide, in long, slow, peaceful waves. A man marched up the slope under a load. As he approached the cowyard the cow bellowed again and tore at the rails with her horns. The man stopped to throw a stone at her and came on. It was Sambo. He went round the back of the house and knocked on the kitchen door. "Where y'want this veal hanged up, missus?" The sickly-sweet smell of fresh blood filled the house.

"You'd do anything. Anything," Emma said. "And so would I."

Her feet clattered back to the kitchen and James lay shivering quietly, crushed by the discovery of his world's instability in the hands of adults, passionate, untrustworthy, given over to a struggle in which he counted for nothing.

Cabell was talking indignantly to himself, "Bleed me, would she . . ." But James did not want to hear. He let himself over the edge of the veranda and crept off to a new hiding-place.

When Cabell had gone to bed Emma dragged him out from under the house where he had fallen asleep among the weeds and the big, golden fungi.

He wanted to hang on to her and be caressed, but she dug bony fingers into his arm and shook him till his teeth rattled. "You little fool! D'you want him to see you and belt the hide off you?"

At the age of ten James lacked the key to the drama of his fears, longings, and day-dreams. Sometimes he saw himself rounding up a mob of scrubbers single-handed and heard his father say, "That's fine bit of work!" Again, he dreamt that his father chased him with a stock-whip and his mother got between them and snatched the whip from Cabell. But at the breakfast-table next morning, when Cabell kept the impassive profile of scar, hooked beak, and eye-patch turned to him throughout the meal, the sharp terrors of his adventure died away in anticlimax. He returned to the schoolroom, subdued by the implacable indifference against which the challenges of his awakening ego were hurled in vain.