There were no answering smiles, no hum of excited greeting. In silence the ranks broke to the shuffling of rubber-soled feet on the sawdust floor. Sick at heart, the governess looked down at the upturned faces below. Not one was looking at the girl in the scarlet cloak. Fourteen pairs of eyes fixed on something behind her, through and beyond the whitewashed walls. It is the glazed inward stare of people who walk in their sleep. Oh, dear Heaven, what do these unhappy children see that I do not? So the communal vision unfolds before them and Mademoiselle dare not pierce the taut gossamer veil by a spoken word.
They see the walls of the gymnasium fading into an exquisite transparency, the ceiling opening up like a flower into the brilliant sky above the Hanging Rock. The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plain and they are at the picnic, sitting on the warm dry grass under the gum trees. Lunch is set out by the creek. They see the picnic basket and another Mademoiselle – gay in a shady hat – is handing Miranda a knife to cut the heart-shaped cake. They see Marion Quade, with a sandwich in one hand and a pencil in the other, and Miss McCraw, forgetting to eat, propped against a tree in her puce pelisse. They hear Miranda proposing the health of Saint Valentine; magpies and the tinkle of falling water. Another Irma in white muslin, shaking out her curls and laughing at Miranda washing out cups at the creek. . . . Miranda, hatless with shining yellow hair. A picnic was no fun without Miranda. . . . Always Miranda, coming and going in the dazzling light. Like a rainbow. . . . Oh, Miranda, Marion, where have you gone . . .? The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave. A junior, remembering how the Bible says the bodies of dead people are filled with crawling worms, is violently sick on the sawdust floor. Someone knocks over a wooden stool and Edith screams out loud. Mademoiselle, recognizing the hyena call of hysteria, walks calmly to the edge of the dais with madly thumping heart. ‘Edith! Stop that horrible noise! Blanche! Juliana! Be silent! All of you be silent!’ Too late; the light voice of authority goes unheard as the smouldering passion long banked down under the weight of grey disciplines and secret fears bursts into flames.
On the lid of the piano stood a small brass gong, normally struck for silence and order. Mademoiselle struck at it now, with all the force of her slender arm. The junior governess had retreated behind the music stool. ‘It’s no use, Mam’selle. They won’t take any notice of the gong or anything else. The class is quite out of hand.’
‘Try to get out of the room by the side door without them seeing you and bring the Head. This is serious.’
The junior governess sneered: ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Miss Lumley. I am very much afraid.’
Above a sea of thrusting heads and shoulders where Irma stood hemmed in by the laughing sobbing girls, a tuft of scarlet feathers trembled, rising and falling like a wounded bird. The voice of evil cackled as the tumult grew. Years later, when Madame Montpelier was telling her grandchildren the strange tale of panic in an Australian schoolroom – fifty years ago, mes enfants, but I dream of it still – the scene had taken on the dimensions of a nightmare. Grandmère was no doubt confusing it with one of those villainous old prints of the French Revolution that had so terrified her as a little girl. She recalled for them the mad black bloomers, the instruments of torture in the gymnasium, the hysterical schoolgirls with faces distorted by passion, the streaming locks and clawlike hands. ‘Every moment I thought: they will lose control and tear her to pieces. Revenge, senseless, cruel revenge. That is what they wanted . . . I can see it all now. Revenge on that beautiful little creature who was the innocent cause of so much suffering . . .’ Now on a pleasant March afternoon in the year nineteen hundred, it was a hideous reality to be faced and somehow dealt with single-handed by the young French governess Dianne de Poitiers. Gathering up her wide silk skirts she took a flying leap from the dais and was hurrying towards the milling group when something warned her to walk sedately with head held high.
Meanwhile, Irma, limp and utterly bewildered, was near suffocation. Fastidious Irma, who deplored all female odours and protested that she could smell Miss Lumley’s peppermint-laden presence in the classroom six feet away, was inexplicably hemmed in by angry faces enlarged in hateful proximity to her own. Fanny’s little snub nose hugely out of focus and sniffing like a terrier with an exposure of bristling hairs. A cavernous mouth agape on a gold-stopped tooth – that must be Juliana – the moist tip of a drooling tongue. Their warm sour breath came and went on her cheeks. Heated bodies pressed on her sensitive breasts. She cried out in fear and tried in vain to push them away. A disembodied moonface rose up somewhere in the background. ‘Edith. You!’
‘Yes, ducky. It’s me.’ In the novel role of ringleader Edith was beside herself, smugly wagging a stumpy forefinger. ‘Come on, Irma – tell us. We’ve waited long enough.’ There was a nudging and muttering. ‘Edith’s right. Tell us, Irma. . . . Tell us.’
‘What can I tell you? Have you all gone crazy?’
‘The Hanging Rock,’ Edith said, pushing to the front. ‘We want you to tell us what happened up there to Miranda and Marion Quade.’ The more silent of the New Zealand sisters, rarely articulate, added loudly, ‘Nobody in this rat-hole ever tells us anything!’ Other voices joined in: ‘Miranda! Marion Quade! Where are they?’
‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know.’
Suddenly possessed of a power that drove her slim body between the closed ranks like a wedge, Mademoiselle was standing beside her, holding Irma’s arm. She cried in her light little French voice, ‘Imbeciles! Have you no brains? No hearts? How can la pauvre Irma tell us something she does not know?’ ‘She knows all right only she won’t tell.’ Blanche’s doll’s face was an angry red under the tousled curls. ‘Irma likes to have grown-up secrets. She always did.’
Edith’s great head was nodding like a Mandarin’s. ‘Then I’ll tell you if she won’t. Listen all of you! They’re dead . . . dead. Miranda and Marion and Miss McCraw. All dead as doornails in a nasty old cave full of bats on the Hanging Rock.’
‘Edith Horton! You are a liar and a fool.’ Mademoiselle’s hand had come down smartly on Edith’s cheek. ‘Holy Mother of God.’ The Frenchwoman was praying out loud. Rosamund, who had taken no part in all this, was praying too. To Saint Valentine. He was the only Saint she was acquainted with, and so quite rightly she prayed to him. Miranda had loved Saint Valentine. Miranda believed in the power of love over everything. ‘Saint Valentine. I don’t know how to pray to you properly . . . dear Saint Valentine make them leave Irma alone and love one another for Miranda’s sake.’
Not often, surely, is the good Saint Valentine – traditionally concerned with the lesser frivolities of romantic love – offered a prayer of such innocent urgency. It seems only fair that he should be credited with its speedy and practical answer: a smiling messenger from Heaven in the guise of Irish Tom, open mouthed and gloriously solid and masculine at the gymnasium door. Dear kindly toothless Tom fresh from a visit to the dentist at Woodend and overjoyed, despite his aching jaws, to see the poor young creatures having a bit of a lark for once in a way. Tom, grinning respectfully at Mademoiselle and waiting for a suitable interlude in the larks (whatever they can be) to ease off, so that he can deliver Ben Hussey’s message to Miss Irma.