So he stumbled at last on the corner in which Alfred Hunter’s 3-litre Bentley stood waiting for him on flat tyres. The most reactionary of all these pieces of sculptured memory assembled in the shed, Alfred’s car stole the show. With its straight-set hood and goggling lamps, its nickel corseting, and once cobby, now deflated tyres, it suggested some mild, deposed monarch. Or Alfred Hunter late of ‘Kudjeri’.
Basil hobbled in the iron boot to fetch the nail from where he kept it, to continue digging grasshopper-corpses out of the radiator in which they had been incinerated. He picked, picked, the dribble soon running out of his mouth, then the grunts, or half-sobs, for murders and tortures perpetrated on earth, for others not yet conceived; only if you were lucky enough, a decent harmless death.
What you doing Basil boy?
Nothing Dd-dadd. After defeating that slight stammer, your voice had developed what seemed like unlimited power; but the limp came to replace the stutter.
Basil stopped picking at the corpses, to leave something for next time. He climbed inside the car. Airlessness, and the scents of luxury embalmed, made him gasp. But his touch received from the gears a vague promise of motion, and wiping the dust off upholstery and the more frivolous fitments, restored something of a former life, both elegant and sybaritic. He got half an erection running his hand over his surroundings. He lifted a walnut-veneer lid: did he imagine the smell of grazed flint still hovered around the lighter? No mistaking the trail of perfume from the little flask in fluted glass. She so deplored vulgar overscented females driving in motorcars scenting themselves some more en route. Had she ever used it? like what she called a public woman. People do what they most deplore. Just a dash darling for fun.
They were driving along that same old endless road into Gogong. They overflowed on him from either side so that he hardly existed; in any case only their little boy. Isn’t it a lovely light Alfred the hills look soft. Because he was a man Daddy said it was the Good Season making everything soft-looking. He spoke in the voice he used for Mother when they were alone: sort of croaking, which also stroked. Mother sat not looking at the hills. After a bit she laughed. Certain words I can’t bring myself to use for doctors — at any rate not Dr Treweek the word B-R-E-A-S-T for instance. Father laughed his smoky laugh. Why not Betty it seems to me natural enough. The smoky laughter like a bridge between them over your head. Oh yes natural I’ll admit. She put out her hand towards him, but stopped on seeing you were sitting between. For driving he wore doeskin gloves, turned back at the wrists into cuffs. The gloves made his wrists look naked, except where his watchstrap was eating into one of them. Dad was hairless at the wrists. Mother suddenly remembered look Basil darling the lambs aren’t they sweet the newborn lambs for their little boy. Do you think he understands? Father was a careful driver; he slowed down always over culverts. Don’t see how he possibly could — not when you spell it. They laughed some more. For each other.
They drove on, and the wind started coming from another direction. She lost control of her gossamer. It flicked your eyeball.
It was still not crying, running. Sir Basil Hunter was forced to take out Enid’s Christmas handkerchief, to mop the trickling.
‘Basil?’
The voice was too real, more forbidding than the figure, its substance diffused into a dark blur by the curtain of light hanging in the doorway. Foolish of him to forget to close the door. At least she could not have noticed him jump: all those rusted machines cluttering the space between them were serving a purpose.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked like everybody else.
‘Nothing.’ Now he was angry. ‘Playing with this bomb. Don’t you remember Dad’s car?’
‘Do I? I suppose I do.’
He had found that girls remember less. Though the glare behind her did not allow him to see her face, he knew Dorothy was wearing the expression to match her voice: that of an older, responsible girl, the thinner for her earnest disapproval.
As she chose her way between the obstructive machinery, narrowing her shoulders narrower still, flattening her chest if possibly flatter with one long glimmering hand, he started scrambling out of the car. However deeply Dorothy and he were committed to each other as partners in a crime, she must not catch sight of the train of images and emotions which had barely stopped flashing past.
Just before she reached him, he managed to slam the car door shut, and stand with his back to the nickel bonnet.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘And this ought to give us more privacy than most places.’ She looked around them, slightly shivering.
He knew he would not want to hear whatever it was she planned to discuss.
Dorothy had indeed planned, after observing Basil make for the shed on other occasions. Unnoticed by any Macrory children, she had kept watch this morning from behind the screen of the scullery window. Though a smell of milk on the turn had roused her fastidiousness, she decided to stick it out.
And now was reunited with her brother, who resented it; she could sense that. To butt in on his private games had usually made Basil hurtful.
For that reason, as she spoke, she was carefully tracing a seam in his coat with one of her long fingernails. ‘I want to talk about this situation we’ve got ourselves into and have to get ourselves out of. I mean to say, we can’t go on sponging indefinitely on strangers.’ As she traced, or rather, dug out the intricate seam, she smiled for her own thoughtfulness.
Outside the theatre, Basil had been inclined to favour postponement; so he blew a raspberry. ‘You can’t call it sponging, can you? They’d be the first to notice. You can be sure Macrory would have let us know.’
‘Macrory the archmasochist? He’s probably writhing in silence. After all these weeks. How long do you suppose it is?’
They were not prepared to join in an accurate reckoning.
‘We have our lives to live,’ Dorothy looked at Basil for approval; ‘however long it may be before the Thorogood Village can offer a vacancy.’ He recognized in her eyes his own fear of developing the theme too explicitly.
‘We might simply go away,’ she said, ‘farther than “Kudjeri”, I mean — out of this country where we don’t belong.’
‘Never did.’ As he confirmed her assertion, he saw she had been watching for him to lie.
Now she was positively disappointed. ‘To you it may mean something — something you aren’t prepared to admit.’ She had raised her voice, to force its scorn past the knots in her throat. ‘I’ve always hated — H A T E D it!’ Though insulated with dust and cobwebs, the shed failed to muffle Dorothy’s voice: it continuted ululating.
As though he had ratted on her.
‘Yes, yes.’ He began moving her towards the door. ‘We’ll talk about it. When we’re calmer;’ hobbling helplessly beside her.
‘What is it?’ she hissed. ‘Is your foot troubling you? The wound? Oh, darling, I thought it had healed—perfectly.’
‘It’s not the foot.’ They had both stopped, and were looking down through the shadow in which they were standing waist deep. ‘It’s the boot!’ Though they were motionless he contrived an exaggerated stumble.