The intimidated Eddie Twyborn climbed in on the passenger’s side. Prowse began doing things to the car with immense and impressive dexterity, which did not prevent it bucking and sidling, threatening to throw them out before they left the starting post.
‘What’s he like?’ Eddie asked in an untimely effort to establish himself.
‘What’s — who?’
‘Old Lushington.’
‘Greg’s all right,’ the manager shouted through a thrashing of gears.
They were cavorting by now, over the stones, towards a cleft in the bleached hills.
‘Soft old sod, but all right,’ Gregory Lushington’s manager intoned. ‘Not here all that much. Bugger’s always globe trotting. Been to bloody Patagonia. Done the China coast. Climbed the Himalayas — well, some of the easy bits.’ Prowse snorted slightly. ‘Wanted to see the rhodradendrons.’
It lulled the passenger to hear about his boss’s travels. It removed him to some extent from the driver’s side and what he suspected the latter’s judgment to be. He did not feel he could count on Prowse’s liking him; yet there was a tingling attraction on his own side, generated, if he would admit, by those hands lying heavy on the wheel.
Suddenly the manager turned to him and said, ‘In the War, weren’t yer, Eddie?’ It sounded almost an accusation.
‘I was — yes. I was.’ He couldn’t apologise enough on sensing it was what Prowse would have wanted.
‘Well, I wasn’t. I was doing what they considered a necessary job. I would ’uv, of course. I talked it over with old Greg. Greg’s had it easy all his life. Hasn’t come in for anything — war or otherwise. Full of money like a tick with blood. Marcia thought I oughter go. That’s ’is wife. She’s away in Sydney. Back any day now. It’s easy for a woman, isn’t it? to decide what a man oughter do in a war. Some women need a man dead before they can appreciate ’im.’
His glance hectic (he had a lip sore breaking out) Prowse was looking to his passenger for corroboration.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Eddie replied, reconstructing the beige Marcia framed in straggles of monkey fur.
The manager calmed down. They were climbing, dipping, swerving, skidding in a sticky hollow; they were facing the direction from which they had come.
‘Fuck that!’ said Don Prowse, and laughed his throatiest from behind the Adam’s apple.
Eddie Twyborn smiled a lulled smile. His fate was in someone else’s hands.
They reached a signpost pointing along a main road. They even ran a short distance over the road’s luxurious surface before turning off again into the country of rudiments and stones.
While still on the metal Prowse explained, ‘This is the way to Woolambi. Where the good times are — six pubs, four stores, the picture-show. Get a screw too, if you’re interested in that.’
They continued driving.
‘There’s a root or two closer home if you get to know. I always say there’s roots for the lookin’—anywhere.’
Again the driver glanced at his passenger for approbation.
‘That’s so,’ Eddie answered, and wondered to what extent his companion was convinced.
‘This is it,’ the manager announced.
Even if his guide hadn’t told, everything signalled arrival. The act of getting down to open gates, even the rustiest, the more resistant, the most perversely chained, gave the stranger a sense of belonging somewhere. A mob of sheep scampering in initial fright was persuaded to turn, halt, and observe those who were possibly not the intruders of its first impression. The phalanx of sheep stood firm, some stamping, coughing, every one of them archaic inside a carapace of what could have passed for stone wool, down to a tinge of parasite moss suffusing its general dinginess. Winter was well on the way at ‘Bogong’. It showed in the staring, wind-ruffled coats of half a dozen horses in the next paddock. Wheeling and pig-rooting, the near brumbies halted only when almost on top of the car, their bright expressions from under wispy forelocks prepared to enjoy such entertainment as human beings had to offer. Here too there was a glint of moss in quizzical muzzles and, possibly by reflection, in fetlocks rising out of a short-pile carpet of a virulent green.
Presently a string of sheds, together with a huddle of cottages, their paintwork faded to a pale ochre, showed up amongst the white tussock on a river bank.
Two stockmen were riding at a distance, slouching, bumping with accomplished ease one behind the other on razor-backed nags whose slatternly tails almost swept the ground. Weather had cured the riders to a colour where they could have passed for Red Indians. They ignored the manager, as he them, more from convention, you felt, than from actual animosity.
Soon there was a bridge of loosely bolted planks buckling beneath the leaping car. Never had river waters looked glassier, more detached in their activity. Eddie Twyborn shivered and breathed deep for the encounter. Then they were across, above them in the middle distance a long low homestead, its windows dark and unrevealing behind a low-slung veranda, beneath a fairly low-pitched, red-painted roof, in corrugated iron. The homestead had a somewhat prim air, that of a retiring spinster of no pretensions beyond her breeding.
The car did not make for the homestead, but for a cottage closer to the river and surrounded by the expected complement of sheds, yards, iron water-tanks, and what must be the dunny. Hawthorns were crowding in upon another deep veranda, providing a break-wind, if also probably a break-light for the rooms inside.
Don Prowse turned on a sourly beatific smile for one who might have been the bride of a shotgun marriage instead of an unwanted offsider wished on to him by his employer. ‘Snugger than it looks, and at the week-end you can bugger off to Woolambi if it suits.’
Eddie Twyborn felt the complete misfit in Don Prowse’s aggressively masculine world; whereas a relationship was waiting to develop between himself, the huggermugger buildings, even a bitter landscape. If the river appeared at first sight hostile, it was through the transience of its coursing waters to one who longed for the reality of permanence.
He was made clumsy and unreal by the manager’s continued remarks, by his attempts at friendliness, by the man’s insistence on shouldering the cabin-trunk again, on grabbing hold of all the baggage if he could get possession of it — in doing the man’s work in fact. It was humiliating.
It might have become worse, creating a puppet tittuping helplessly through slush and puddles, if a woman hadn’t appeared, neither young, nor all that old, at any rate her hair still black, her cheeks as tanned and ravaged by the climate as those of the ‘Red Indian’ stockmen loping on their lean horses.
‘Mrs Tyrrell,’ Prowse grunted by way of introduction under the stress of shouldering the trunk and carrying the suitcase.
Mrs Tyrrell mumbled through a smile, licking her thin, natural lips. She revealed two brown, upper fangs with nothing but her tongue to fill the gap. She was dressed all in black, whether from grief or for practical reasons, it was not possible to tell. She simpered a lot, and hugged a bobbled crochet shawl round narrow shoulders. In the lower regions, what had once been a laundered apron had failed to protect her practical black from a storm of flour.
Anyway, Eddie Twyborn had hopes of this Mrs Tyrrell, her bright black eyes already alight with confidences and an offer of sleazy kindliness.
‘Bet you’re hungry, mister,’ she said. ‘Fix yer some breakfast. Bet Mr Prowse won’t say no to a second breakfast. ’E’s a good doer.’
At the same time she started a struggle for the valise with which the young man had been left. He clung on desperately, as though possession of it were his only means of self-assertion.