The memory of Arthur standing at her elbow as he often did while she struggled with a difficult piece of correspondence wiped the elegant guardian from her mind. All this was getting her nowhere. With something like a groan she took up a thin steel-nibbed pen and began to write. First to the Leopolds, undoubtedly the most impressive parents on the College register: fabulously rich and moving in the best international society, but now in India where Mr Leopold was buying polo ponies from a Rajah in Bengal. According to Irma’s last letter, her parents would at this moment be somewhere in the Himalayas, on a frantic expedition with elephants and palanquins and silk embroidered tents; address, for at least a fortnight, unknown. At last the letter was completed to the writer’s satisfaction – a judicious blend of sympathy and practical commonsense. Not too much sympathy in case by the time it was received the whole damnable business had been satisfactorily cleared up and Irma back at school. A problem, too, whether or not to touch on the black tracker and the bloodhound. . . . She could almost hear Arthur’s ‘Masterly, my dear, masterly.’ And so, according to its purpose, we may be sure it was.
Next in order of precedence came Miranda’s mother and father, owners of vast cattle stations in the backblocks of Northern Queensland. Not quite in the millionaire class but entrenched in a setting of solid wealth and well-being as members of one of Australia’s best known pioneer families. Exemplary parents who could be relied on not to fuss over trifles of missed trains or an epidemic of measles at the College; but in this preposterous situation as unpredictable as anyone else. Miranda was the only girl, the eldest of five children, and, well Mrs Appleyard knew it, the apple of her parents’ eyes. The whole family had been staying at St Kilda during the Christmas holidays, but had returned last month to the luxurious isolation of Goonawingi. Only a few days ago Miranda had happened to mention that the Goonawingi mail arrived with the stores, sometimes only once in four or five weeks. However, one could never be sure, thought the Headmistress, sucking on the nib, that some busybody of a visitor wouldn’t come riding over with the newspapers and let the cat out of the mail bag. As will have been noted Mrs Appleyard was not prone to sentiment, yet this was the hardest letter she had ever been obliged to write in her whole life. As she gummed down the flap of the envelope the closely written pages proclaimed themselves the messengers of doom. She shrugged: ‘I am becoming fanciful’, and took a nip or two of brandy from the cupboard behind the desk.
Marion Quade’s lawful guardian was a family solicitor, very much in the background except for the payment of Marion’s fees. By good fortune he was at present in New Zealand, on a fishing trip at some inaccessible lake. In Mrs Appleyard’s hearing, her guardian had lately been referred to by Marion as a ‘dodderer’. With the fervent hope that the solicitor would live up to his reputation and let sleeping dogs lie until further information came to hand, the letter was signed and sealed. And finally, another to the octogenarian father of Greta McCraw, living alone with his dog and his Bible on a remote island in the Hebrides. The old man was unlikely to make trouble or even communicate, having never penned his daughter a line since her arrival in Australia as a girl of eighteen. All four letters were stamped and laid on the hall table for Tom to post on tonight’s train.
6
On the afternoon of Thursday, February the nineteenth, Michael Fitzhubert and Albert Crundall were seated in amicable silence before a bottle of Ballarat Bitter in the little rustic boathouse fronting Colonel Fitzhubert’s ornamental lake. Albert was off duty for an hour or two and Mike was taking a temporary respite from assisting at his aunt’s annual garden party. The Lake was deep and dark, icy cold despite the languorous summer heat, overgrown at one end with waterlilies whose creamy cups caught and held the rays of the late afternoon sun. On a patch of lily pads a single white swan was standing on one coral leg, now and then sending out showers of concentric ripples across the surface of the lake. On the opposite side, banks of treeferns and blue hydrangea mingled with the natural forest rising steeply behind the low verandahed house on whose lawns the guests were strolling under the elms and oaks. Two maids behind a trestle table were serving strawberries and cream: it was rather a smart party, including guests from nearby Government Cottage, the summer residence of the State Governor, with a hired footman, three musicians from Melbourne and plenty of French champagne. There had earlier been talk of putting the coachman into a tight black jacket for service at the champagne bar to which Albert had replied that he was hired to look after the horses. ‘As I said to your Uncle, “I’m a coachman, sir, not a bloody waiter”.’ Mike laughed. ‘You look like a sailor, with those mermaids and things tattooed all over your arms.’
‘A sailor done them for me, in Sydney. Wanted to do me chest, too, but I ran out of cash. Pity. I was only fifteen . . .’
Transported to a world where boys of fifteen cheerfully spent their last shilling on being thus disfigured for life, Mike gazed at his friend with something like awe. He himself at fifteen had been hardly more than a child with a shilling a week pocket money and another for ‘the plate’ on Sunday mornings . . . Since the afternoon of the picnic a comfortable non-demanding friendship had developed between the two young men. To see them now – Albert loose of limb in rolled-up shirt sleeves and moleskin trousers. Michael stiff in garden party attire with a carnation in his buttonhole – they looked an ill-assorted pair. ‘Mike’s all right,’ Albert had told his friend the cook. ‘Him and me are mates.’ And so in the finest sense of that much abused word, they were. The fact that Albert, who had just tried his friend’s grey topper on his own tousled bullet head, looked like a music hall turn; and that Mike in Albert’s wide brimmed greasy sundowner might have stepped from the pages of The Magnet or the Boys Own Paper, meant less than nothing. As did the accident of birth that had rendered one of them almost illiterate, and the other barely articulate, at the age of twenty – a Public School education being by no means a guarantee of adult expression. In each other’s presence, neither young man was conscious of his shortcomings, if such they were.
There was a cosy sense of mutual understanding, and not too much talk. Topics of conversation were mainly of local interest, when they arose; the mare’s off hind leg which Albert was painting with Stockholm tar, or the Colonel’s obstinate enthusiasm for the time-wasting rose garden that called for more bloody weeding than an acre of spuds and anyway what was the good of all them roses? Neither had anything much in the way of embarrassing political, or for that matter any other kind of convictions, which they would have recognized as their own if shown them written down in cold print. Which in friendship makes everything simpler. There was no obstructive nonsense, for instance, in Mike’s father being a Conservative member of the English House of Lords, while Albert’s, when last heard of, was an itinerant rouse-about, in perpetual strife with the Boss of the Shed. For Albert, young Fitzhubert was the ideal companion, sitting silently for hours on an upturned chaff box in the stable yard, drinking in the other’s native wisdom and wit. Some of Albert’s more hair-raising anecdotes were true, others not. It made no odds. For Mike, the coachman’s free-roving conversation was a continual source of pleasurable instruction, not only about life in general but Australia. In the Lake View kitchen, the Honorable Michael, a member of one of the oldest and richest families in the United Kingdom, was commonly referred to as ‘that poor English bastard’: an expression of genuine compassion for one who obviously had so much to learn. ‘Cripes,’ said Cook, whose wages were considered good at twenty-five shillings a week, ‘I wouldn’t be him, not for a cartload of nuggets.’ Meanwhile, in the drawing-room Mike was telling his Uncle and Aunt, ‘Albert’s such a jolly good chap. And so clever. I can’t tell you what a lot he knows about all sorts of things.’