When they were reassembled, she asked, ‘Doesn’t it make you feel guilty, darling?’ while surveying a non-existent landscape, smiling a bright, casual smile.
‘For what? And why? For God’s sake!’ If Dorothy de fucking Lascabanes wasn’t the archetypal rat.
‘For foisting ourselves on these poor Macrorys.’
‘Would they have let themselves in for what they didn’t want?’
Basil and Dorothy Hunter were getting back into the car. The scrub around them was of the poorest. Left-over blue metal at the roadside petered out in stones, then rocks. There was a dry scuffle of heat and lizards.
Dorothy advised practically, ‘Whether they want us or not, we’d better push on. It’s worse arriving after dark.’
All women, wives even, are fundamentally big sisters: Dorothy he saw and heard easing her elastic in front of a brother.
‘Would they have accepted us,’ he harked back, ‘if they hadn’t wanted us?’ She had got him upset.
‘Mr Wyburd suggested they were rundown. Perhaps we could offer them something — as rent, I mean.’
Basil grumbled, and drove.
Dorothy, for her part, was ready to dismiss the idea of making too large a hole in Mother’s cheque; though she had bought the little dress she was wearing: nigger for longevity.
‘It was only a thought,’ she murmured.
She pointed her elbows at the windscreen, and the wind blew down the short sleeves into her armpits liberating her from obligations. Basil must have felt included: he snuffle-laughed, and rearranged a thigh.
Only in competing with distance, the gongs and drums made it difficult to maintain a human balance. He had to remind himself I am Sir Basil Hunter — the actor; while the Princesse de Lascabanes kept looking in her handbag for something she was unable to find.
What he, what either of them expected of the Macrorys, it might have been indelicate to enquire. Or he might not have known. He was pretty sure Dorothy had no idea, though if asked, she would pretend to one.
Where physical hunger heightened by the crudest sentimental longing had prompted him to buy and guzzle the pie, now a deeper, more confused desire made him urge the car across the blinding plains towards this mythical house in which a real family was living. He anticipated flopping into bed, pulling up the sheet till it became a hood to intensify the darkness, curling as tight as his stubborn bones would allow, as he remembered possums, beans, a foetus in a bottle. Around him as he fell asleep he would hear the sighs, the muffled assertions of people living in the house from which he had run away in the beginning.
Intimations of frost reached them as they drove into Gogong. Sheets of fluctuating copper had replaced glass in shopfront and window. Barking dogs, thinner for the approaching cold, slavered and gulped at the silence. One little shit-coloured bitch, wearing a strap for collar, was threatened with drowning in waves of dust while chasing after this foreign car to head it off. All the watching faces looked curiously opaque, some of them blinded in addition by the spectacles they were wearing.
‘Gogong, eh?’ The metal had entered into Basil’s voice.
‘Yes, indeed! The same as all the other ghastly little towns.’ She knew it was not. ‘Let’s get it over.’
She had hunched herself sideways in her seat as though to take advantage of her brother’s protection, or if this were not forthcoming, to shoulder off any unpleasantness she might not be able to endure.
They were nearing the point on the outskirts of the town where the road forked, one branch stretching unequivocally north, the lesser straggling over the hills to ‘Kudjeri’. In the cleft between the two roads a clump of dark conifers had survived the larger design for a park; drought and neglect had done for the rest; though at its insignificant most, the park would never have become more than the background to a monument in bronze, which no doubt had been the original intention.
From the newspaper cutting Mother had sent years ago Basil knew what to expect. So he slowed down. Whether Dorothy, too, was in the know, he had never heard; the way she was turning her back to the thing she was probably unaware the monument to Alfred Hunter existed. But he had to look. And was fascinated by this ugly marriage between civic bombast and innocent human purpose and achievement; for if the head, the chest, the stance aspired to the heroic, the wrinkles in the bronze waistcoat and pants dragged the attempt back to earth and a hand which might have been propped on a bamboo occasional table instead of the horn of a merino ram.
Basil could have lingered, grinning and squinting up at ‘Father’ if Dorothy’s fist had not started drumming on his thigh. ‘Go on — do! I can’t bear it!’
So that he accelerated, and they spurted forward, shot over the level crossing, and bumped their heads on the roof of the car.
He thought he would not mention the statue which his mind was busy resurrecting; when Dorothy murmured, ‘He wasn’t like that.’
‘Can you honestly remember?’
‘Oh — yes — no — not distinctly.’
It was his own recurring predicament.
To cheer them up, he shared a malicious fantasy, ‘I wonder Mother didn’t insist on their working her into that deathless group.’
‘On a chaise longue!’ Dorothy’s laugh dropped like a stone.
After that they fell silent, driving through the hills this side of ‘Kudjeri’. By the light of dusk, paddocks were thrown wider open; on the other hand, rock and scrub were double-locking themselves against intruders. The car ranted on, over grit, and potholes filled with a thin mud. A sky drained as shallow as a sheet of colourless waxed paper had resumed its cyclic promises: all of them mysteries which strangers drowning in their purple: depths must fail to solve. Perhaps the car would at least stalclass="underline" it stuttered and faltered enough at times to encourage hopes. Then in the darkness of a hollow, opening out ahead and below, the house you could remember only by flashes or in dreams, was pinpointed as a cluster of lights, flickering and failing through a great mushroom-clump of trees, before becoming fixed by the car’s approach.
Dorothy said, ‘This is what I dreaded — arriving at nightfall.’
Basil too, if he would have admitted.
Doubts failed to discourage the car: willows were swooning round a river bend; then the sweep of Portuguese laurels, battered by age, animals, and children. At last, the oval of a rosebed.
‘I’ve never felt more frightened,’ Dorothy chittered and giggled; ‘not even on my wedding night.’
Basil knew his lips were trembling with the smile he would normally compose with confidence, to take a call, or to impress those he was meeting for the first time.
As they got out, people were coming down the steps towards them.
However it might strike their hosts, Dorothy ducked back, looking for some something — anything — roses, a rose! She trampled the edge of the unkempt bed, and came across one or two autumn buds, cold, tight, pointed, which would dry on their stems without opening. She had torn her wrist, but that was the least of the situation.
‘Come on, Dot!’ Basil was chivvying his awkward sister.
Then the Hunter children were holding hands, by whose choice they would not have known, prepared to face a music which was bursting on them, agonizingly clear, but discordant.
‘… you’ll just have to get used to it. It won’t be what you remember — will it, Rory? do you think? Children, don’t make a nuisance of yourselves
By degrees they might furnish the house with their memories. For the moment it looked bare: the Macrory establishment did not run to comfort, let alone luxury. In the hall Sir Basil caught his toe in a rent in what must have been an oriental rug before dust and decay had taken over. Beyond the rug, there was simply a sound of feet grating over grit, in corridors, on stairs, and in some cases, whole rooms.