He walked back quickly the way he had come. The brown waters of the river reflected the thoughts of one who was unwise enough to unmask them on its bank. The river froze him. He could not imagine what he was doing at ‘Bogong’—or anywhere, for that matter.
Mrs Tyrrell was standing waiting, he was relieved to see, on the edge of the dry-rotted veranda.
‘Marcia come back,’ she told him. ‘She’ll ’uv brought me some-think. Marcia brings the loveliest gifts.’
‘She must be all right then?’ He tried it out in the manager’s voice.
Mrs Tyrrell sucked her gap before answering. ‘She’s right enough. Nobody’s ever all right. ’Aven’t you found that out, love?’ She ended up in a cackle, in which he joined, while avoiding contact with a callused hand.
The cottage was full of dusk, smoke, and a smell of roasting mutton.
‘Better take a squint at me shoulder,’ Mrs Tyrrell immediately announced.
Satisfied, she slammed the oven shut again.
‘Arr, dear, the winters,’ she sighed, ‘they make a person cry!’ then, more cheerfully inspired, ‘ ’Ere, you little bugger, why don’t-cher make yerself useful and light the bloody lamp? Prowse’ll be back any minute an’ say we’re not dermestercated.’
While he fumbled with and lit the lamp, she busied herself investigating a cabbage for slugs. ‘I’ll like ’avin’ you around,’ she told him; ‘you an’ me ’ull get on like one thing.’ She sighed again, disposing of a colony of slugs. ‘It’s the girls I miss out ’ere. Never the boys. Not that you isn’t a boy,’ she realised. ‘But different. A woman can speak out ’er thoughts.’
He should not have felt consoled, but was, to be thus accepted by Peggy Tyrrell. The flowering lamp he set between them on the oilcloth made a little island of conspiracy for the woman’s blazing face and the pale ghost of what people took to be Eddie Twyborn.
Presently they heard a truck, boots, a slammed fly-screen door. Eddie would have chosen to delay the manager’s presence, but it was soon with them in the dining-kitchen, not least the stench of his recent exertions.
Don Prowse was overpoweringly cheerful. ‘Quite domesticated, aren’t we?’ His hands sounded like sandpaper.
When he had gone to throw water at his torso and rid himself to some extent of the stench, Peggy Tyrrell winked at her ally.
‘Dermestercation! What did I tell yer? Can’t get over ’ow ’is wife walked out on ’im. You’ll ’ear all that when ’e’s warmed up.’
He returned, the hair above his forehead glittering in a watered, orange slick. He produced a bottle from the lower regions of a hobbledy dresser and poured himself a handsome tot.
‘Learned the lay of the land, have we?’ Always smiling, his teeth were his own, and good. ‘That’s the dunny, if the old woman didn’t tell yer,’ he pointed with his pipe through a smoked-up window. ‘It’s a two-seater — for company.’
Eddie Twyborn said, ‘I’ve never done it in company, and perhaps I couldn’t.’
The manager grunted. ‘Perhaps you could in a place like this. A judge’s son could get ground down like anybody else.’
Eddie Twyborn might have agreed.
Perhaps Don Prowse realised. ‘ ’Ere,’ he said, ‘you’d better have one for the first night. Everybody finds ’e depends on ’is grog in these parts. When you get yerself a bottle, you can write yer name on it, and I’ll write mine on mine.’
They drank their whiskey in company. Eddie was glad of this employment for his hands, and it made him feel more masculine.
‘Didn’t he say anything?’ he asked.
‘Who said what?’
‘Greg. Didn’t he ask to see me, perhaps? He’s my father’s friend.’
‘Greg’s a slow old bastard. Never know what ’e’s thinking. ’E’ll ask all in good time — whoever yer father is.’
They knocked back the whiskey, and the old woman produced a blackened shoulder out of the oven.
‘Greg’s off again — round the world,’ Prowse informed them while carving. ‘He likes the travel life. And why not? If you can afford it.’
Prowse must have been very well paid not to have sounded vindictive.
‘Is Marcia going too?’ asked Eddie.
‘How — Marcia? What do you know about Marce?’
‘Nothing. But she’s back. I saw her driving the Packard up the road.’
Prowse hacked the black mutton and Peggy Tyrrell relieved the cabbage of a boiled slug.
‘No,’ said Prowse, ‘Marcia’s not going with Greg. She sort of belongs more to “Bogong”—not that you’d think it at first sight.’ The carvers slithered into the gravy. ‘Marcia’s of the land — if you know what I mean. Greg only inherited it.’
They sat down and began their meal. Everyone, it seemed, even the newcomer, was involved in a primitive ritual, no grace, but plenty of tomato sauce.
Just as Eddie had sighted yet another slug, the telephone almost tore itself from the wall, and the manager leaped at it.
‘Yes, sir … Yes … Yes, Mr Lushington. Yes … In the morning … Eddie was asking whether … Yes …’
When he had returned to his creaking chair Don Prowse somewhat unnecessarily informed them, ‘That was the boss. ’E’ll see yer in the morning, Eddie. Wants to take a look at the wethers on Bald Hill.’
They made further play with their mutton.
‘I told you,’ said Prowse, spitting out some gristle, ‘Greg is slow, but wouldn’t forget — least of all ’is friend’s son.’ A second shred of gristle followed the first.
Mrs Tyrrell produced the spotted dick.
After their meal, as he smoked his pipe and drank another whiskey or three, the manager grumbled, ‘It’s the winters that get you down on the Monaro. If you could escape the worst of it — drive up north and thaw out on the coast for a coupler months — like the moneyed bastards do — or Europe.’ A tear of frustration, alcohol, or retrospect had appeared surprisingly in a corner of one of Prowse’s eyes. ‘The winters were what the wife couldn’t stand. She walked out on me — I’d better tell you before others do. It was the cold. Well, good luck to ’er! She was never much use to a man. It’s the kid I miss. Haven’t seen ’er since they went.’
Mrs Tyrrell had continued sitting in a corner, yawning, and holding her forearms. Old tales left her untouched. She might have been a gnarled, half-burnt tree stump.
If Prowse’s confidences touched Eddie, it could have been in the light of his own contemplated defections from Angelos Vatatzes. He could smell the night trains he had never caught towards a hypothetical freedom somewhere beyond the Côte Morte. In the front bedroom of this creaking house the departed Mrs Prowse, all pallor and resentment, might have been awaiting her orang-outang on the iron bedstead with the brass knobs.
If he had been a woman in body as well as psyche, Eddie might have put out a tentative hand and touched an orange paw.
On realising that it would have been for his own comfort rather than the sufferer’s, he shivered and suggested, ‘Think I ought to be turning in.’
‘You’ve got something there, Eddie.’ It was again hearty, banal, masculine; never more masculine than when they went outside together, backs at the oblique, pissing on the frost.
‘Christ!’ chattered Prowse. ‘Freeze the balls off yer, wouldn’t it?’
The newcomer had begun to feel that perhaps he was more inured to cold from life in the trenches, not to say exposure during a female existence.
Or he could have been numbed by exhaustion and the situation he found himself in. As he fell asleep under the army blankets and the threadbare bedside mat, Peggy Tyrrell could be heard through the wall mumbling a drowsy rosary. Then there was the slamming of the screen door as Prowse went outside again. It occurred to Eddie that the manager had only just relieved himself, but could be — who cared? moved to sit alone one side of the two-seater dunny, chattering with cold, black mutton, and retrospect.