Eddie muttered that he was acquainted, but did not know them. Marcia may not have heard; she had fallen into a trance, from which she issued in the tone of voice they adopt for money and pedigrees.
‘… frightfully rich in all directions … Joan was Joanie Sewell of Sewell’s Felt. Ghastly if you come to think, but substantial. And Curly — Golson’s Emporium. Curly’s the bore of bores, but another substantial investment. So there you are.’
‘A normal conjunction.’
‘But darling,’ she screamed against the wind while seizing his wrist, ‘leaving Joan Golson aside — and Eadie — it was you who brought your mother up — I just don’t care to associate with abnormality.’ After a little pause she continued, ‘Some women are inveterate.’ He wondered where she had learnt it. ‘They adore to have queer men around. They find it amusing. A sort of court fool. I couldn’t bear to touch one.’
‘You must have touched a few,’ he suggested, ‘a few of your women friends’ fools — if only in shaking hands.’
She said, ‘Oh well — as a social formality one has to — don’t you understand? Fortunately,’ she added, ‘most of them go away to Europe. They’re too ashamed.’
The riders rode.
The winter sun was forcibly withdrawn behind a sliver of nacreous cloud. The hills undulated in time with the horses’ gait, or at least with Hamlet’s. Eddie’s disastrous mount only created a tumult, as though they were stumbling over molehills or excavated rabbit warrens.
Marcia remarked, ‘Nobody understands or loves this part of the world as I do. Not even Greg who was born here. None of them.’
He saw no reason for questioning the sincerity of what she had said.
‘I believe Don understands how you feel,’ he told her.
‘Don!’ She bared her wide-spaced teeth as she had at the moment when telling about the bogong moths and he had visualised her devouring them. ‘What has Prowse been saying? That crude and repulsive man.’
‘Only that you love the country.’
‘Oh.’
She subsided after that.
They had completed a circuit, he realised, and were returning towards the homestead and the clutter of cottages and sheds which comprised the heart of the Lushington property of ‘Bogong’. The paddocks were a grey-green like Marcia Lushington’s old velour. They rode past eruptions of wiry briar, graced by notes of tingling scarlet and a flickering of wings or incipient leaves. Invisible birds were calling through the cold air along the river, the wraiths of curlew or plover; he could not have told; Marcia would have.
Suddenly she began chanting, at no one so much as the landscape spread out before them, ‘A foreigner came here once — one of those complacent Hunter Valley squatters — and said — behind my back of course — that “Bogong” is sterile country. Would you dismiss it as that having lived here?’
‘Hardly barren. You’d be out of business if you were,’ he tried to console.
‘Oh,’ she coughed, or spat, ‘you’re talking like a man now! Business—super-phosphate—crossbreeding!’
She turned in her saddle and wrenched his hand from the pommel where it was resting.
She said, ‘Darling, you know what I mean.’
He did, but he couldn’t do anything for her.
They rode on hand in hand till they reached the outskirts of the Lushington garden and the walled graveyard he had found on the occasion of a walk.
They drew in their horses outside the elaborate gate, or perhaps Hamlet knew where to halt.
‘Did somebody — did Prowse,’ Marcia asked, ‘tell you about this too?’
‘He told me only that Greg had wanted a son.’
‘All men do, I expect,’ she said, ‘to vindicate themselves.’
‘I think I’d prefer a daughter.’
‘But you’re more sensitive, Eddie,’ she blurted, ‘whatever you may do or say to destroy my opinion of you.’
Briskets pressed to the wall, the resting horses forced him to read the inscriptions on the headstones inside:
GREGORY LUSHINGTON
born 28 May 1912
died 5 August 1912
GREGORY LUSHINGTON
born 5 May 1914
died 6 January 1915
GREGORY DONALD PROWSE LUSHINGTON
born 17 May 1917
died 19 November 1918
The riders did not linger.
‘Why “Donald Prowse” if you despise him?’ he asked as they rode away.
‘Oh — it was after Kath walked out. Greg wanted to do something for him. I did too, for that matter. We thought it might help to make him our child’s godfather. The child died,’ she ended. ‘He died.’
They rode on, the horses bowing their heads, so it seemed, though of course they were returning to home, fodder, and idleness.
After unsaddling their horses at the stables, they walked towards the house, where they saw Mr Lushington had come out and was waiting for them, the lenses of his spectacles discs of gold.
Adopting a tone of jovial annoyance, he told them, ‘I’d begun to worry.’
‘Why? That I’d fallen off?’ asked his wife chidingly.
‘No. That the pikelets would go soggy, and Mrs Quimby give notice.’
‘We’ll eat them soggy or not,’ Mrs Lushington declared. ‘As far as I’m concerned, pikelets are a means of conveying melted butter to the mouth.’
She gave her companion a melting smile at the same time as her husband brushed up against his son manqué.
‘Did you have a good ride?’ Mr Lushington asked Eddie.
‘Yes,’ she answered for him. ‘And talk. So much better than stewing in the house over old stud books and agricultural pamphlets.’
‘Oh,’ said Mr Lushington, ‘what did you talk about?’
‘Things,’ Mrs Lushington replied. ‘Life, I suppose. But not in any intellectual way. So you needn’t worry.’
He hiccuped once or twice and stumbled on the steps they were mounting.
‘If you’d like to know, I didn’t stew over old stud books or agricultural stuff.’
‘What did you do then?’ his wife asked with an aloofness which suggested she was listening intently as she took off her stretchy cardigan and faded velour.
‘I wrote a poem,’ Mr Lushington confessed.
‘Those!’ she sighed, tizzing up her hair, and when they had emerged into stronger light, ‘You’ve got it over?’
He said he had—‘more or less.’
They were all three staggering slightly.
‘What was it about?’ Mrs Lushington asked, now that it was out in front of one who was, in most essentials, a stranger.
Thus cornered, Greg Lushington bleated, not unlike one of his own stud rams, ‘I expect it’s about love — that’s where everything seems to lead — in some form or other. Unfulfilled love.’
His wife hurried the party as quickly as she could towards a room referred to as the Library, where she knew the deliquescent pikelets would be found, and which housed the encyclopaedia, the dictionary, and her ration of novels from a lending library in Sydney. Anything else in the way of books, anything suggestive of Greg’s vice, must have been hidden from neighbourhood eyes in some unfrequented attic.
The Lushingtons brightened at the prospect of pikelets and tea, and Beppi joined them from the kitchen regions where he must have scoured a pan already.
They distributed themselves in what was another neo-Tudor room: dark panels, stone fireplace, with a suite of leather furniture straining at its buttons where it wasn’t sagging on its springs.