“But why Terminus Road? Why directly opposite us?” Mother couldn’t leave it alone.
“They had to go somewhere,” Arthur said.
“What have we got to hide, Annie?” Dad asked.
Only Mother and Waldo knew.
And the Poulters came.
Bill Poulter, who remained scraggy, and awkwardly articulated, began to build the home. There was someone, some lad out of Sarsaparilla, giving him a hand. They were putting together the blank box, very quickly, it seemed, so much so the grey flannel undervests hung darker from their shoulders to their ribs. In the end the structure looked less a square house than an oblong houseboat.
All this time Mrs Poulter had been living in a tin shed on the site. She cooked on an open fire, and the smell of burning wood floated up and crossed the road, together with the smells from her boiling pot, or more accurately, half a kero tin.
Mrs Poulter herself began to come across the road. She borrowed a cup of sugar, a cup of rice. She was the high-complexioned decent young woman they got to know, who put on a brave red hat to walk up Terminus Road to Allwrights’ or the post-office. Sometimes Arthur brought the orders home for her, sometimes if it was closing time, they walked down together, Arthur carrying the brown-paper bags and the newspaper parcels. She seemed to take to him, or at least she didn’t mind, as some women did.
From the beginning Mrs Poulter gave the impression of wanting to perform some charitable act.
“If you was ever sick, you know, you’d only have to give us a shout, Mrs Brown, and I’d come across and do what I could. Sit with you at night, or anything like that. Or if it was the men, Bill would. I think Bill would,” she was careful to add.
Waldo knew how this sort of thing embarrassed their mother.
Mrs Poulter told Mother the War had got on Bill’s nerves sort of, not that he had been gassed or shell-shocked, or gone overseas even, but from being in a camp. Afterwards he couldn’t settle. That was one of several reasons why they had come to Sarsaparilla. Where she hoped to keep a few hens, and grow flowers, she loved all flowers. Bill was going to get taken on by the Shire Council. Only temporary. Because Council labourer wasn’t much of a job for a man. Bill could kill, milk, fell trees, he had once entered for a wood-chopping competition though he hadn’t won. It was terrible dry up-country where they had come from. That was Mungindribble. Her own people came from Numburra. Her auntie had started having the indigestion, they thought, when it turned out to be cancer. They said, said Mrs Poulter, there was a cure for it from violet leaves. If only she could make certain, she would perhaps grow the violets, and post the leaves in a moist parcel.
Mother decided after that not to encourage Mrs Poulter. Though you couldn’t say Mother wasn’t always polite, not to say kind. She gave Mrs Poulter a piece of lace insertion.
Sometimes when his wife crossed the road, to borrow, return, or yarn, Bill Poulter would come down to the grass edge of their side, and stand looking across, squinting because of the sun. His arms, usually exposed as far as the armpits, for he had had her cut off the sleeves, were stringy rather than muscular, with prominent veins. He never had much to say, not even, it seemed, to his wife.
Although the material wasn’t promising, Waldo began to wonder whether he could make Bill Poulter his friend. He walked springily at the prospect, deciding how he should go about it. He had never really had a friend of his own sex, unless you could count Walter Pugh, for whom he could never have really cared, because of those ridiculous literary ambitions. But take Bill Poulter — virgin soil, so to speak. He might turn Bill into whatever he chose by cultivating his crude manliness for the best.
So, if Bill Poulter happened to be hoeing or hewing within easy distance as he passed, Waldo took to flicking his head sideways at him, as he had seen other men, and sometimes his neighbour would flick back, nothing more, in recognition. On other occasions Bill just didn’t seem to see. Waldo used to walk quite prim and virginal wondering whether Bill would recognize or not. It began to matter a great deal.
Until he knew he must take the bull by the horns, as it were, if he intended to influence their neighbour’s mind and future. He might, for a start, lend him a book, something quite simple and primitive, Fenimore Cooper, say, they still had The Deerslayer in the Everyman edition. Waldo made his decision returning from the Library on a Friday night. That Sunday morning he went across to Bill Poulter, who was splitting a pile of wood for the stove. (Mrs Poulter had gone up the road to church or chapel, or whatever brand of poison she took.)
Waldo opened by flicking his head. Then he squatted down, to watch in silence, as he had learnt from seeing other men, or comment knowledgeably on the weather.
Bill Poulter chopped. He nearly always had a sucked-looking cigarette-butt hanging extinct from his lower lip. Though sometimes he would pause to roll a fresh one.
“So you think it’s gunna rain, do yer?” Bill responded antiphonally as he rolled his next cigarette. “Could do,” he dared add. “Clouds are comun from the right direction.”
The situation couldn’t be called desperate. The climate was too positive. A smell of male exertion on the air encouraged Waldo to come to the point.
“Ever go in for reading books?” he asked very cautiously.
“Nah.” Bill swung the axe, and split the knottiest chunk of wood. “Never ever have the time.”
“I’d lend you a few decent books,” Waldo offered.
Something had made him boyish.
“If you read the paper,” he coaxed, “and I see you do take the Herald, you might find you had time for a read of a book.”
“Nah,” said Bill. “Wife reads the paper. But what’s the point? Don’t know anybody down in Sydney.”
Waldo’s long wrists hung between his squatting thighs as he watched Bill Poulter chop.
“Then there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said at last.
Bill didn’t deny that. He was flinging the wood into a barrow, piece by piece, as he split it, and the fuller the barrow the more wooden the thud.
Bill said through his ugly teeth: “Don’t find time enough for thinkun, let alone gettun littery.”
Waldo refused to feel humiliated. He continued squatting for a little, smiling a shallow smile at the chunks of wood, at the knots split apparently by light.
Soon after this Bill Poulter got taken by the Council and Waldo saw less of their neighbour, as their movements did not coincide. On occasions when he did catch sight of Bill, the stringy rather than muscular arms with veins so prominent as to become obtrusive, he no longer flicked his head sideways. And Bill did not even look, forcing Waldo to remember the day he had offered the books. It had become so sickeningly physical. It was as if he had been snubbed for making what they called in the papers an indecent proposition.
But Waldo did not hate Bill, not exactly, or not yet. You could only despise ignorant, suspicious minds. Or the simple, wide-open ones. That Mrs Poulter, for example, with her puddings, and her hens troubled with the white diarrhoea. Not that he spoke to her. Not that he saw her, even. But knew she was there.
Arthur used to keep him informed: “Mrs Poulter let me taste the lemon sago pudding. When I brought the order down. She has a hen, she says, will bust herself from laying eggs the size she does. Mrs Poulter says there was a goat she knew at Numburra ate a basinful of yeast. The goat blew up.”
“Why,” Waldo asked, “do you have to listen to that stupid, babbling cow?”
“I don’t just listen. We tell each other things.”
“I’m sick to death of the very Name!” Mother said at last.