A Cry from the Dark (8 page)

So it was with schoolfriends other than Hughie that Betty sat down and communed when she was collecting and sifting material for her article. One day after school Betty sat on the playground with some of her best friends in the school and read them the draft of her first paragraph.

“By nine the sun was beginning its daily blaze over Bundaroo…”

When she came to the bit about “open landscapes and closed minds” she substituted on the spur of the moment the words “boundless hopes and limited prospects.” When the little group began discussing what the rest of the article should contain, one of her friends—Alice Carey, her best friend—suggested that she go and talk to Won Chi at the vegetable shop, and another that she should talk to Mr. Blackfeller about his prophecies, and describe the little aboriginal reserve two miles out of town. These suggestions seemed to justify the change she had made in the wording, but one voice demurred: “Surely you should be concentrating on the Australian-ness of the place, not on the outsiders.” The remark seemed to justify her original comment.

“It's a bit funny if aboriginals aren't considered Australian enough to get in,” she said in a deceptively mild tone of voice.

“Well, Australia like it is now,” said the boy, who was Steve Drayton.

The subject of the Aborigines in the area came up again, from an anecdote told to her by Hughie one day on their walk to school. He had been buying a slab of fruitcake in Bob's Café the day before when Bob had opened up the subject.

“You the boy I see talking to Mr. Blackfeller all the time?”

“That's right.”

“Can't see what you two have to talk about.”

“Oh, we talk about his pictures, mostly.”

Bob spat decorously behind the counter.

“Them daubs. I don't call them pictures…Still, I suppose he gets himself a living by them, unlike most of his bunch.”

“He doesn't charge enough for them,” said Hughie.

“Is that right? You'd know, would you?…See here, young man, you want to be a bit more careful who you mix with. Mr. Blackfeller's all very well in his own world and with his own people, but he wouldn't be allowed in my café, and he wouldn't be allowed in Grafton's, and that tells you something, doesn't it?”

“Oh yes, it tells me something,” said Hughie.

Betty relished the anecdote, but some part—some small part, she insisted to herself—wished it had not been Hughie that it had happened to, that he had not been the one to make that last, barbed remark. That part of her understood—even shared—the resentment of her schoolmates of the outsider, particularly the outsider who would say what he thought even if it meant assuming a superiority to the people of his adopted country. But Betty had glimmers of understanding of the personal uncertainties, the divided nature and loyalties, of the boy who said it. The exchange did not find its way into her article.

It was a few days after this that Betty, at the end of the school day, was following some yards behind Hughie through the playground when she heard a little chorus from the younger children from the primary section, a glorified hut at the far end of the playground near the riverbank.

“Here comes the nancy boy, here comes the homo!” the angelic voices sang out in unison. It was the development that Betty had most feared, but one she had known in her heart was bound to come. Hughie gave no sign of reacting to the children, beyond a stiffening of the shoulders. Betty considered whether to stop and say something to the children, but then wondered what on earth she could say. They didn't even understand what the words meant that they were using.

She speeded up her walking and linked arms with Hughie just outside the gate.

 

The performance of
Tosca
stayed with Bettina when her arthritis kept her awake that night, and over her breakfast of scrambled eggs. She dwelt particularly on the second act, with Scarpia's study so conveniently situated next to the torture chamber. How Puccini, for all his horrible hang-ups, did sometimes ring the bell: the apparently innocuous setting, concealing something monstrous. The unspeakable being done while around it normal civilized life seemed to flow on as usual.

There had been no Scarpia in Bundaroo. Though what Sam Battersby had been after was not so different.

She walked slowly through to her study and sat down at her desk. The events she was chronicling, the small-town feeling against Hughie, against all the Naismyths, was so apparently petty, so insignificant set against the Grand Guignol of torture and summary executions that had lodged in her mind since last night. But it was the same feeling that in the Southern states of the United States had led to lynchings, and in Nazi Germany and the Eastern European countries had led to consequences which her mind, most minds, could not yet grasp the full horror of.

She leaned forward to turn on her tape recorder. Then she stopped and sat back in her seat. The machine was not where it should be. It had been moved. Not by much, by maybe two or three inches, but moved it had been. It was no longer in exactly the best position for her old arthritic hands. The cleaning firm had not been in since the previous morning, and in any case were sternly forbidden to do anything about her desk. She remembered coming out in the night to go to the lavatory. The light had been on in the study, and thinking she was becoming forgetful in old age she had come over and switched it off. She shivered at the memory.

The machine had not moved itself. Someone had been in.

“I'm taking Dad to a club tomorrow night,” said Mark to Bettina when she called in at his flat in Earl's Court to collect Oliver and Sylvia to take them to the Barbican.

“To a
club
?” said Bettina, her mind toying with all sorts of possibilities about the sort of club concerned.

“Yeah—show him a bit of the London scene. Sylvia thought she'd give it a miss.”

“I'm not surprised. I'd give it a big miss myself. Do you think your father can cope with more than ten minutes of the sort of club I think you mean?”

“Course he can, Auntie Bet. He's a tough old bird, and he's very young at heart.”

“But is he young at ear?”

Mark looked at her, his thought processes almost audible, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

“Dad'll cope, you'll see. And if he doesn't like it he can slip out as soon as he wants. There's plenty of pubs in the vicinity, not to mention other amenities.”

In the interval of
Julius Caesar,
when Ollie had slipped off to the gents, Bettina said to Sylvia, “I can't think why Mark would want to take his father clubbing.”

Sylvia shrugged.

“Oh, I'm sure he'll take it in his stride. The pill popping and drug taking won't faze him—if he notices it.”

“I wouldn't be able to stand the music. Mark says there are plenty of pubs around. I don't think drinking alone in a London pub while your son tries to chat up the birds in a nearby club is much of a night out.”

“I think Oliver just likes knowing what sorts of things are going on. Like a novelist, maybe.”

Bettina laughed.

“At my age I've become very choosy about the sort of experience I can be bothered to cultivate…Mark seems to be quite unfazed by the curb-crawling charge.”

“He is. He just says it's a good way to pull in the chicks. The fact that it's illegal he says is ‘just silly.' Mark is very unfazable on the surface.”

“I'd like him more if I was sure it was only on the surface. What goes on under the surface? Does anything? I wondered when he told me he was taking Ollie to a club what sort of club he was talking about. I discarded the Garrick or the Athenaeum, but I did wonder if he meant a gay club.”

Sylvia shook her head confidently.

“I've told you, Mark is mildly heterosexual. So far as I can see he is interested in conquests to boost his own opinion of himself and his desirability. The conquests are always female. Whether he'd say no to an approach from a man I don't know, but that's different.”

“True…You'll be on your own tomorrow evening. Would you care to come out for a meal?”

There was only a tiny pause before Sylvia answered.

“You don't have to, Bettina.”

“I know I don't have to. I'd like to.”

They looked each other straight in the eye, something they did not do very often.

“In that case I'd like it very much,” said Sylvia.

Then Ollie came back, and by common and unspoken consent they kept their dinner date to themselves.

Bettina chose for their first meeting on their own a new restaurant off Kensington High Street. It had not yet received extravagant plaudits or brickbats from the burgeoning tribe of restaurant critics, so it did not attract the crowds of punters that both kinds of notice bring with them. There were two or three empty tables between them and the next diners, so they could talk without that buttoning-up effect that closeness to strangers brings with it. They walked there, and Bettina, like many older people, welcomed the presence of someone to guide her, restrain her at crossings, and cope with the manifold hazards of the London streets.

“Well, I
hope
Ollie is enjoying himself,” she said as they settled over their menus, “but I certainly wouldn't bank on it. I'm sure Mark is going on his merry way without a thought for his father. He's that sort.”

“Probably,” agreed Sylvia. “But that may be what Ollie would prefer.”

It occurred to Bettina that parents and children, in particular neglect of customary duties between them, was not the happiest choice of subject. They talked over the menu, which was fashionably eclectic, and Bettina ordered for both of them, with an Alsace wine to follow their gin and tonics.

“Verdict so far on your trip?” Bettina asked, sipping her gin.

“Fabulous. Enchanting. Exciting. All the words the advertisers and travel writers use. It's been what I always had in mind, the thing I had to do eventually. A lot of younger Australians think in terms of visiting Asia these days—”

“I suppose it's cheaper,” said Bettina dryly.

“Well, it is that, but I think they genuinely feel that that's where Australia's future is. I sympathize, but I can't follow suit. I suppose I'm more interested in the past. Our past is here. It must be a generational thing.”

“Both my parents talked of Britain as ‘home,' ” said Bettina. “In my father's case those feelings had been reinforced by the war—the First World War of course. That had an effect on me. When I felt the need to get out of Australia it was inevitably England I came to. It had to be an English-speaking country, and one I could relate to quite easily. Quite soon I felt confident enough to start writing about it. And don't say I never returned to Australia, as a silly young actress said to me the other day. I have been back.”

Sylvia left a second's silence.

“I know you've been back,” she said. “But they've always been duty visits, haven't they? Deaths?”

“Yes,” said Bettina bleakly, feeling cornered.

“You've never been back to travel round, see what it's like
today,
go to see areas you've never seen before.”

“There are plenty of
those.
Dad and Mum never traveled. No, I haven't been back for that sort of visit.”

Sylvia left a silence again, obviously asking: why not?

“A writer of my kind,” said Bettina, slowly and carefully, “stores up experiences. You conserve the old ones, and you go into new ones only if you think they might be useful. That's why I'd never go with Mark to clubs, to listen to crap music and watch young people taking drugs. It would upset me, but more important: I would never use it. And you have to be careful not to complicate old experiences, so that you become unsure what is
then
and what is
now.
If I ever use Australia again it will be
my
Australia of the interwar years. To experience the Australia of today would unsettle me, and unsettle my memories. I
know
Bundaroo as it was then. Bundaroo as it is now is of no interest to me whatsoever.”

“I think I see,” said Sylvia, equally carefully. “So it's not just a question of…what happened then?”

“The rape. No, it's not just a question of the rape. Though I got out soon enough, and never regretted it. The thought that I might have lived on there, seeing him walk around the town as if nothing had happened, makes me shiver. Though as it turned out he left the town soon after anyway, the man who is thought to have done it. No, my Bundaroo is the sum of all my days up till the day of the rape.”

“Were there any results of…of the rape?”

Bettina looked at her, then shook her head.

“Have you been listening to rumors? Ollie knows the truth.”

“Ollie was so young at the time.”

“There were no results, as you call it. I went to Armidale, to a sister of my father, because I couldn't bear to go on living at Bundaroo with people being nice to me on the surface, but looking at me out of the corners of their eyes and talking about me out of the corners of their mouths. It wasn't to have a baby or anything like that, though of course I was terrified at first…If there were results they were less…tangible. I certainly never went back to Bundaroo willingly.”

Sylvia took a deep breath.

“One of the results was that you didn't want children, wasn't it?”

This was it. Truth-telling time.

“Yes…All the first weeks I was in Armidale were a sort of preparation for if I was expecting. I tried on my Auntie Shirley's makeup to see if I could look older—for a possible visit to an abortionist. Then I realized that if I did go to some backstreet fixer in Sydney or Newcastle I would need money. I broached the subject to my aunt, and she was shocked at first, but gradually she came round to my way of thinking. But by then it was becoming clear that I wasn't pregnant.”

“But the experience got you used to the idea that you didn't want children?”

Bettina thought, wondering whether to protest that this was too bald a statement, then decided against it.

“Yes, it did. I knew precisely by then what I wanted to do in life, wanted to be. Though I went to Europe, later joined up, went through as much of the war as my age allowed, it was all a question of getting experience, and going through or getting to know about things I could
use
. I was going to be a writer, and that was that. When I got pregnant with you it coincided with a telegram to say that my mother had cancer. Cecil, my husband—your father—didn't have many uses, but he had some influence in military transport. He got me on a flight to India via Egypt. There was a wait for the first plane, then one for the second. Another wait in Bombay for a boat to Perth—that took a fortnight—then the train across the Nullarbor Plain. By the time I'd seen my mother, talked, tried to bring my dad out of his misery, the pregnancy was…well-established.”

“Too late to have an abortion, you mean?”

“I suppose so. But anyway I was so used to it that I was reconciled to having it…
you.
Not to bringing you up or anything but to having a baby. In any case, getting an abortion then, in Australia or England, wasn't easy. To be honest, I don't think I thought about it much that time around.”

“I'm glad you didn't. I've had a good life, on the whole.”

Her gratitude seemed misplaced. Bettina hurried on.

“But, as I say, I knew I didn't want a child for life, with all that that entails. You probably know what happened. Bill Cheveley had friends—your parents, people who couldn't have children of their own. I trusted Bill absolutely on people he knew. He went wrong with the Naismyths senior, but that was because he took someone else's recommendation. My dad arranged it and came to Europe with his sister to fetch you—still a small baby. I'm afraid I didn't feel much. Not the sort of emotions a mother is meant to feel.”

“Too late for you to agonize about that now,” said Sylvia.

“Much too late. Funnily enough, the thing I remember most from that time has nothing to do with being pregnant. It was something my mother told me, in bed, in the hospital at Walgett. She was in great pain from the cancer, but all the time I had had the idea of something on her mind, something she wanted to tell me. Then one day, when the pain was a little easier, she did.”

“What was it?”

“She told me that she and Dad had met through a lonely hearts column in the local newspaper. She was working as a waitress in a café in Grafton. He was just back from the war, and living in Lismore. They met up, liked each other, and went on from there. She was afraid I would find it ridiculous, but I didn't. It seemed rather touching. ‘I couldn't have got a better man,' she said, ‘not anyone straighter or more faithful. I've been a lucky woman.' It taught me—if I needed teaching—that there were other kinds of marriages than the kinds you read of in romantic novels. After the funeral I went straight back to Europe and sued for a divorce. As I said, Dad and Auntie Shirley came over and got you in 1947, when you were still a baby…I'm glad, so very glad, that you've had a good life. But please remember you've nothing to thank me for. Quite the reverse. Thank your real parents—that's what they were—thank Bill Cheveley, thank my dad, who took it up with him when he knew I was pregnant. But don't, ever, shame me by thanking me.”

 

By the middle of November the heat in Bundaroo was dominating everyone's daytime and nighttime existence. Temperatures reached the hundreds, and the sun blazed down with a ferocious intensity. The inhabitants of Bundaroo who were not born there wished they could wear more clothes, not fewer, to protect their skins from the scorching and incessant attentions of that tormenting orb, burning and desiccating all the exposed skin. Like a dictator arrogant from years of power it ruled their lives—this in the run-up to examinations and the end of the school year. And with the sun came the flies—always around, always an irritant. And the flies were just the most all-pervasive of an upsurge in insect and animal life that was seldom joyous, seldom cause for celebration, but more often an intrusion that most people wanted to be free of. Everyone at Bundaroo High was on edge—Hughie and Betty not the least, though they both made endeavors to hide it.

“There must be something you could do to help Hughie,” said Betty.