‘An arrow,’ she said, ‘tipped with white. A swan’s feather.’
Because this was something in which they indulged, sometimes casually over the shoulder, to throw to Father the bright, coloured ball. So now she laughed and threw it as she moved towards the door, her brown face, her black hair, glistening under a beaver skin.
‘I am going,’ she laughed, caught still in this last mood, ‘I am going to walk down towards the bridge. Because my feet have died.’
‘There will be another black frost,’ said George Goodman, returning out of the distance.
He said it with an air of surprise, as if it were too sudden, to find himself again in the dream of actuality. His eyes were almost feverish above the grey thicket of his beard. He is old now, she sighed. She has grown, he said, straight as a brown arrow. And as she left, he smiled.
Theodora took down a gun from the rack in the passage. She took down one of Father’s guns, because in time the little rifle had become a polished toy. She let herself out by the side door, under the pines, into the blast of frost, in which her brittle body soon trumpeted its own silver. Consoled by the weight of the gun on her arm, she walked fast on the ringing frost. She walked among the tussocks with the long strides that made them say as Theo Goodman was some bloke in skirts.
How white the skies were at Meroã, wintertime. For years she remembered the winter skies, the pale watered silk. And sound coming from a long way, a calf, or horse’s feet. A horse’s feet, in winter, came up the road and over the bridge as steady as drums.
‘Hey, Theo!’ called the man’s voice.
She stopped to look, through her tears that the frost had made, at a face she could not see.
‘You won’t catch much today,’ called the man. ‘They’re all frozen stiff.’
That, she saw then, as he bent down towards her over the pommel, was Frank Parrott in a full moustache. His eyes were blue and watery with the cold.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s me. I’ll take you on one day,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring a gun. I’ll put you through your paces.’
‘There was also to be a picnic,’ she said.
He looked at her out of his blank blue eyes. ‘What picnic?’ he asked.
She drew down the corners of her mouth and said that it did not matter.
‘What picnic?’ said Frank.
‘Are you here for long?’ she asked.
‘It all depends.’
But with no indication how. He stared down out of his mystified blue eyes, which reminded her, she laughed, of the eyes of a young bull.
‘Yes,’ said Frank, ‘I shall come down and take you on.’
And his horse danced. A horse always danced under Frank Parrott. Whenever he rode there was a fine piece of bravura, a jingling of metal.
‘I shall wait,’ she called, watching him.
Now, now that she could watch him with calm eyes, she did so with pleasure, but sceptically, the red, arched neck of the young bull that she would have loved to touch, to put her hand on his poll. Frank made her feel experienced, but when he cantered off, her smile dropped. She was not quite sure.
Anyway, this time Frank did as he promised. Frank came. He rode through the laurels in a jingling of metal, jumped down with a great report, and there he stood, a reddish gold, against the yellow stone of Meroã. Theodora said: Oh, well.
‘And I shall come,’ said Fanny as they took their guns, ‘even though I don’t shoot. To see Theo make a fool of Frank.’
Fanny pursed her mouth and held her head on one side in order to show the savages she was whimsically superior. Fanny’s face bloomed in the frost beside Frank’s red gold. Why, God, am I this? Theodora asked, knowing that expectation and the temperature had turned her skin a deeper yellow. Now the weight of her gun would not console.
They walked round the side of the hills, the black cone, and, springing from its side, the little, blunter knob. There was a cleft between, from which some ragged trees sprang, instead of smoke. And soon they began to see the ruins of the madman’s folly higher up on the cone.
‘Don’t let’s go up there,’ said Fanny, pulling in her neck.
‘Why,’ asked Frank.
‘It gives me the creeps. That side of the hill. Do you remember old Mr Lestrange, how mad? I went up there once, a long time ago, and he was chewing a piece of bacon rind. Quite mad. And bristles on him, like a red pig.’
Fanny’s face became with her adventure exquisitely funny, in its disgust and fear delicately pink. She pulled at a piece of grass and giggled. Frank laughed too. He could not look at her enough.
‘A rum old cove,’ said Frank. ‘But I can’t remember.’
‘Nor can Fanny,’ said Theodora. ‘Mr Lestrange died when she was two.’
‘But I can, I can!’ cried Fanny. ‘You are quite wrong, Theodora. I can remember-his red bristles.’
‘Mr Lestrange,’ said Theodora, ‘was black.’
‘Anyway,’ said Fanny, she shook her head, ‘it gives me the creeps up there. How are we going to shoot at something when nothing ever comes?’
She looked about, a little too keen, confident that her failure would not detract. She could feel his eyes. He would swallow down any little prettiness she might perpetrate. She could hear Theodora kicking at a piece of stone.
‘Look,’ cried Fanny, ‘there are rabbits. Now,’ she said, ‘you can shoot.’
She gave it to them, but not without contempt, brushing it off her hands.
Frank shot. He missed. There was no subtraction from the scrambling of the rabbit scuts. Theodora took aim. Then they watched the tumbling uncontrol of fur. For a moment time had been put off its course. The fur subsided on the earth. The silence trembled, ticked, ran. It had begun again.
‘One to you,’ said Frank.
His face was redder than from cold. He slapped the butt of his gun with a large hand.
‘I told you,’ said Fanny, ‘that Theo would thrash you.’
But she touched his arm to soften the blow, and her glance excluded Theodora.
They began to walk again. Near the warrens the other side of the hill there were many rabbits, scuttering or still. There was shooting enough. Altogether, in the afternoon, Frank Parrott shot six rabbits. He began to hum. He told them about the time he swam the Barwon River in flood.
‘Come on now, Theo,’ Frank said, ‘you’re not up to form.’
Because, after the first shot, Theodora had not shot another.
‘It’s your day,’ she said.
She walked, and thought: He is like a big balloon that I hold at the end of a string, tightly when I shot the rabbit, but then he soared, as I let him out, giving him the string, the sky. Because the rest of the afternoon she had aimed a little to the right. She had wanted to. She had wanted to feel his child’s pleasure soar, and say this is mine.
‘It’s all very stupid.’ Fanny yawned. ‘I shall drink gallons of tea.’
Theodora heard Frank’s breathing. She did not altogether like her power. So she listened to his breathing dominate her silence, and this was better.
Until the little hawk floated, on his upstretched wings, out of the drained sky, to fold himself, to settle on a white bough.
‘We’ll have a smack at that,’ said Frank, already at his shoulder.
‘No,’ said Theodora, ‘not the little hawk.’
Because she remembered the red eye, and for a moment she quivered, and the whole hillside, in some other upheaval of mythical origin. She knew the white air, closer than a sheath, and the whole cold world was a red eye.
But she said quietly enough, ‘Not the hawk. Please.’
But Frank had fired.
And they watched the hawk unfold his wings, drawn upward off his branch, stream out into long and lovely distances. Because Frank had missed.