Best Australian Short Stories (37 page)

It seemed to be tacitly assumed by all the regulars who frequented the parlour that I knew why he was absent; so in the light of this simulation I concluded that I was not entitled to ask questions. The men of Melamo had a subtle way of evading interrogation by creating the feeling that they had no need to be interrogated; no one could be off ended about their silence, merely puzzled. There was something almost mystical about the situation. I was left with a burden of guesses as wild as those which had assailed me when the ex-trooper had gone through his strange ritual during the journey to Pilton City.

One evening, quite inadvertently, I manoeuvred tbe ex-trooper into the corner that had been so popular with the old Jew and, as we sat down, I noticed the look which passed into his face: a look which had the inscrutability of a bedroom blind when scenes not difficult to be imagined but maddeningly impossible to be sure of were happening behind it, or the inscrutability of the mountains when they were surrounded by their impenetrable darkness, although, by reaching out, one knew that they could be defined. His face, like Ike Olan’s up the school chimney was, despite its outlines before me, completely hidden, and, because of this, extremely evocative of speculation. With a small revelatory shock I had suddenly little doubt that a mind capable of turning the rather positive and compelling forehead which compassed it into a neg-ation was also capable of murder.

Confronted with this headless trunk and stimulated by the beer to a scientific or poetic awareness, I began to put arithmetic and conjecture together. According to the ex-trooper’s own words, the ghost town had not been entered for about fifty years. It had probably been built, inhabited, and abandoned within the space of roughly ten years. Gid, as I knew him, could have been anything from seventy to a hundred years of age. I decided on the mean, and subtracted five to give my theory more credibility. He would have been a very young gold-buyer; still, if the youngest, the one more likely to have survived his companions in crime. Perhaps—and here arithmetic abdicated to conjecture—he had been the “ol’ whale” of the “bunch” who had “done in ol’ Lor’ Sammy”. With a fortune in gold and mass-slaughter on his hands, he would hardly have dared, being shrewd enough in the first instance to have become a gold-buyer, to show himself to the civilized world again. What better retreat than Melamo, where no questions were asked and none solicited—although I couldn’t devise even a conjectural equation that would be true for all values of x, x being the unknown quantity in the query: What purpose had he hoped to achieve by the heinousness?

But I suspected that, on the Saturday morning when the ex- trooper and I rode down the gap towards a hoard of gold and secrets, a miser had found his one great love threatened for the first time for half a century. If he had been on his death-bed—as it was, he looked belligerently healthy for his age, albeit unpleasant in odour—Gid would somehow have contrived to follow us, rifle in hand. He may have trailed, unmolested and unmolesting, a less dangerous man than an ex-trooper trained to astuteness, another man might never have heard him and would have been less likely to discover skeletons of gold. The ex-trooper did hear him and had acted as unscrupulously as the old Jew would have done had we, like two Egyptologists, gone opening tombs and unearthing the “ghosts” of Pilton City.

Somewhere near the old mining town a corpse dispatched by some quick, noiseless means—a club on the head with the butt-end of a rifle, a rope round the throat, a hatchet-edge in the brain—lay decomposing in the damp depths of a precipice or the obscurity of a covert. The thought was an eerie one, and made me want to withdraw my face as successfully as the man before me had done, into an inscrutability that was so similar to invisibility. I would never know what really happened because in all probability the men of Melamo regarded Gid’s disappearance as purely his own, the ex trooper’s, and my affair.

That tacit assumption of theirs—that I knew—was not only mystical but significant. Very likely they silently respected me. I had been the ex-trooper’s partner in a programme leading to the extinction of one who had always been an unsociable blot in the pub parlour. At this point, in bewilderment, I gave up conjecture, forgot about arithmetic, and ordered two more beers. The ex-trooper’s face emerged, like Ike Olan’s from its chimney, a little quaint for its sojourn there, but comforting.

The day when, a year later, I climbed aboard the coach that had brought me to Melamo, Clarry was out cattle-duffing, the ex-trooper had gone up to the hills to help Andy in some problem respecting the still, Ike Olan was drunk over his concertina, and the man in the beard who had answered my first and only knock on the swing- doors of the homestead-hotel, was in charge of the bar and felt himself, very willingly, slave to it. So that only Grant McLachlan saw me off, with a few airy words and a not entirely irrelevant quote from Browning which I knew to be as much a sign of appreciation as had been the toast and the back-slaps all round in the pub parlour the night before.

Let one more attest,
I have lived, seen God’s hand thro’ a lifetime,
and all was for best.

My pupils, the youth of Melamo, like their fathers, felt no necessity for regrets or valedictory speeches. They were, in between their serious irresponsibilities, more honestly concerned about the new schoolie, who had been due to arrive that day. I wondered what his reactions would be to the one faint light stuttering its welcome through the trees.

The driver of the coach, wearing the same expression that he had worn on the night he had delivered me, greeted me and took me up as if he had put me down only the day before.

“Great mornin’.”

It was a great morning, for good weather in that country was one of the things which made it unforgettable. The scenery, so inoppor-tunely referred to by him on that night three years ago, was lovely, I had discovered, the men of Melamo golden-hearted, and their way of life intangible.

“HE’S just as ghastly as we thought he’d be,” the boy shouted in a hoarse whisper up the stairs, and his words reached the visitor waiting in the front room. Or enough of them for him to wonder what the boy had meant He heard he and “ghastly”, but he didn’t know what it was, didn’t hear it properly, and he thought the boy must have said “ghostly”. He glanced down at himself, sitting in the glazed chintz chair.

He didn’t
look
ghostly. His hands were folded neatly in his lap, his legs quite elegantly crossed. His brown suit had been made at home and he realized now that perhaps the man who had made it had cheated him, saved a bit on the lapels, which were not quite wide enough. But his shoes more than made up for the suit. They were very light tan—almost golden, and they sparkled and twinkled in the late evening light coming through the windows. His cousin had purchased them in London, they were of the very best quality, though perhaps too narrow for his feet His socks were a very dark maroon, and he had a handkerchief, pure silk, to match, in his top pocket. He put up a hand to make sure his hair had not become in any way disarranged. It hadn’t. He really couldn’t imagine why the boy should call him ghostly. He didn’t feel like a ghost at all. He considered himself, in fact, a perfect gentleman.

Unaware of this, they kept him waiting for half an hour. He had begun to get restive, and when they came into the room they found him giving his shoes a polish with a small piece of yellow cloth, a shoe polisher, which he always kept neatly folded in his trouser pocket for emergencies. Now he thrust it, hurriedly and clumsily, hoping they had not seen, into his coat pocket, where it made a small bulge.

He got up quickly and plunged across the room towards the tall, elegant woman and the shorter, stoutish man. He offered them his hand, in the friendly fashion that was his custom, and pumped hers heartily up and down, making a small indentation in his own from her rings.

“This is indeed a very happy occasion,” he said, for that is what he had decided to say, while he was waiting. It sounded even better than he had hoped, so he said it again.

“So glad you could come,” the woman said, after her husband had introduced them, and she trailed away from him, in a bored way, to a cigarette box on a low table.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” the man said, and he, too, walked away—to a small bar in one corner of the room.

“No, no, not at all. It is my fault, entirely.” He sat down in the middle of the room, and watched his host and hostess busying themselves on either side of him, although some distance away. He didn’t know why it was his fault. He’d arrived at six, at the time they’d asked him to come. But he said, “It was entirely my fault. I arrived early.”

“Oh? You didn’t have any trouble finding your way ?” Marie Greenberg was standing now quite near him, an unlighted cigarette waving aimlessly from her right fingers. He jumped to his feet again, saw some matches on the mantelpiece, and, with an explosive burst of flame, lit her cigarette. She collapsed wearily on to a chair and he looked at her shoes as he said, “Not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. When I arrive in any big city I generally purchase a map. Then I have no trouble. It is not even necessary to request directions from passers-by.”

“How clever,” she murmured, as her husband came towards them, a silver tray in his hands.

“I’ve made martinis. That okay for you, Rao ?” The three glasses were arranged in a triangle on the tray, the pale liquid almost level with the rims.

“Orange juice, if it is convenient,” he said The sight of Green berg with a tray in his hand had made him forget he was the host. He looked, rather round and dark, perspiring a little in the warm air, a little like a waiter, a steward.

“Oh, pardon. If you have it? Or water? A glass of fresh, iced water, perhaps?”

“Sorry. You don’t drink, I take it?”

“Thank you, no. I have never in my whole life touched one single drop of alcoholic beverage.” He said this proudly, expecting exclamations of surprise and possibly incredulity to fall from their lips, but they looked rather strongly disapproving, and Greenberg called his son to get a glass of orange juice from the kitchen.

They sat idly, waiting for this to come before they could raise their frail glasses to their lips, before the evening could get under way. She, still looking disapproving, gazed at the end of her cigarette, which she had not yet started to smoke. Harry was bad-tempered because he hadn’t yet had his first drink of the day, had been called in early from tinkering with his car to get ready for their guest, thought the guest impudent anyway to have presumed on the hour they once spent in each other’s company at New Delhi airport. Rao was quiet because he didn’t know what Australians talked about, at this hour of the day, or when visiting each other at any time. There was much he wanted to discuss, to tell them, questions he was hoping they would ask him. He thought, sadly, of visits at home—the shout of voices, the excitement, the many people coming and going.

The boy came with the orange juice, and released them.

“Cheers!”

“Cheers!”

“Cheerio!”

A little silence fell around them like a cloak. He groped his way out of its folds.

“You have a very nice place here. Damn fine. Everything is just so.”

“Glad you like it. It’s handy.” Harry didn’t say to or for what. “Have a good trip?” He went on. The martini had reached his elbows. A good sign.

“Ah, yes. The aeroplane was delaying in Singapore, but I was able to make some purchases there to send home to my wife.” “Oh, are you married, Mr Rao? I didn’t know. Harry didn’t tell me”

“I didn’t know,” Harry said. “You weren’t married when I met you, were you?” he asked, remembering the airport, the heat, the warmish orange juice.

“No, no. I have married recently, since we met.”

“Well, congratulations.”

“Many thanks.”

“And is your wife living by herself during the time you’ll be here?”

“Oh, no. No, no.” He was vehement enough and would have been more so if he could have imagined a house, a flat, even a room, with one person, a woman, his wife, in it alone. This was beyond his imagination. He thought perhaps they were joking.

“She’s living with my people. My father and mother, and my sisters.”

“And what did you buy her in Singapore?” Marie asked.

“Oh, some jewellery, one pair of slippers. She asked for one silver bracelet, but they were too costly.”

Harry put down his glass. “Time for another?” he began, but caught his wife’s eye. “Perhaps not. Shall we go? Don’t want to be late for our table.” He snapped off one of the lights, took
his wife’s fur from a chair in the hall, and put it gently round her shoulders. He’d paid a lot of money for that fur, didn’t want it handled roughly. They stood for a few seconds at the front door, and Rao said:

“Pardon, may I know where the lavatory is?” In the small, aston-ished silence that followed, he heard the boy’s half-muffled snort of laughter somewhere beyond the hall.

“I have drunk many cups of tea and one glass of orange juice this afternoon, so my need is pressing,” he said, wishing to stifle their surprise with an explanation, and Harry made a gesture towards a door farther down the hall.