Harold told Eddie, ‘Better come back some morning. We’re better in the mornings. I’ll show you the stud beef.’
The guest looked back once through the gush of eternal affection avowed by the Winterbotham parents and friends, himself and Marcia lugging Don more or less by his armpits, and there was Helen, standing as though in the spiral of a willy-nilly. Another moment and their breath might have united, her teeth clashing with his through the wounded lip.
As it was, she stood grinning through her affliction at what he saw she recognised as his.
The band was lurching into yet another reprise of ‘Marquita’ as Mrs Lushington revved up the black Packard. ‘My men,’ he heard Marcia shout at the hosts of ‘Belair’, but the reference was lost in the general hubbub.
Then they were driving down the moonlit clefts, between the stereoscopic buttocks of hills, amongst the lacy tatting of antique trees. If the trees looked less substantial, once or twice his cheek, his closed eyelids, were stung as though by strands of wire. He opened his eyes to see a fox, its red eyes glaring at him from the bed of a dry creek, before it turned and skittered away on spindly legs into the scrub.
In the same way the Winterbotham rout skittered from his mind. His head bumping, as they drove between the white, recurring hills.
Waking from a doze, he asked, ‘What became of the shawl? The Spanish shawl in the photograph. On the piano.’
Marcia snorted her disbelief. ‘Fancy noticing that shawl! And remembering it tonight.’
What he remembered more vividly was Helen Winterbotham’s non-smile, as sculptural as the natural details through which they were driving. The Spanish shawl no more than flickered like the tail end of the Winterbotham rout, the Winterbotham friends, Bid’s nervy fingers.
‘Actually,’ Marcia said, ‘the shawl flew out of the car somewhere on the way back from a Winterbotham party. Greg was ropeable,’ she giggled. ‘He’d paid quite a lot of money for it. In Seville.’
She guided the Packard round a curve.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he couldn’t complain as much as he might have. Because he had been with us to the party. It was fancy dress,’ she confessed, and with a naked shoulder warded off any disapproval on her lover’s part.
‘What did you go as?’
‘Carmen.’ It fell like a stone into the river bend they were crossing.
‘For a time,’ she explained on recovering herself, ‘Bid and Harold were all for fancy dress. They had the most extravagant costumes made for them by The Buttonhole.’ Marcia’s voice had assumed the humble tones of the disguised rich. ‘Bid as Queen Elizabeth — the Primrose Pompadour — God knows what. Harold I forget — but something to match.’
‘Did you find anyone to match your Carmen?’
Half-turned towards the back seat, she entered on a suppressed shriek. ‘Don was my Don José’
Don must have been sleeping.
‘And Greg — if he was of the party?’
‘Greg insisted on going as himself.’
Marcia drove more painstakingly.
‘Of course you won’t approve, Eddie. The young are too wise.’
‘I can’t feel I’m young. I’ve got an old man hiding inside me. Always been there.’
Marcia did not at once comment, but finally came out with it. ‘I wonder whether you’ll find a young man in the old man you’re going to become. It would give your life balance, and be a kind of justice, wouldn’t it?’
He might have enjoyed that more if he hadn’t felt moved to ask, ‘What did Helen Winterbotham go as?’
‘Nothing. She shut herself in her room. She wouldn’t come out.
‘Too wise again.’
‘Or too brutal!’ Marcia gave her most brutal laugh. ‘The young love to hurt.’
They were driving over the loose bridge at ‘Bogong’. They were arriving. Don Prowse was deposited.
‘Shall I come with you, Marce?’ asked Eddie.
‘No, darling.’ She flung off his dutiful kiss. ‘You don’t want to, and I can’t bear sozzled men.’
She looked back, however, after re-starting the car. ‘Don’t forget the Golsons. They’ll adore to see you.’
Mrs Tyrrell had an announcement to make; her voice refined to what she probably considered gentility, it reproduced the tone of a provincial newspaper’s gossip column which, in her own state of illiteracy, she could never have read, but with which her daughters and her cronies must surely have made her familiar. ‘Madam is expecting ’er friends Mr and Mrs E. Boyd Golson, arrivin’ Thursdee on a short visit. Wealthier, I’m told, than Lushingtons themselves. Mrs Edmonds says there’ll be a big shivoo Saturdee night, after the guests ’uv rested from their drive. Mrs Edmonds couldn’t say for sure, but would take a bet that Mr Twyborn and Mr Prowse has received an invite to the homestead.’ After which, Mrs Tyrrell lapsed. ‘That Mrs Quimby don’t know whether she’s comin’ or goin’. She’s lost the nozzles to ’er pipin’ outfit. All I can say is, good luck to ’er.’
On the Thursday evening, while unsaddling the black filly and mixing her feed, Eddie watched a car approaching across the flat. The Golsons were driving a maroon Minerva. As the planks of the ‘Bogong’ bridge alternately rattled and thundered, he saw a thicker, balder Curly at the wheel, and Joanie wearing lipstick, jowls, and dark glasses. She had bound her head for the journey, and perhaps country abandonment, in a chiffon scarf. Curly had congealed; he was looking straight ahead; Joan glanced about nervously with the dry bemused expression of one who has been reading a road map with only intermittent accuracy for the last few hours.
He felt for them, for all those who had survived the game, and Angelos, no longer there, whom he had truly loved, though to be honest, had often only just restrained himself from axing, just as Angelos had not been able to resist drawing the knife. Now more than any of them perhaps, he pitied the E. Boyd Golsons entering Lushington territory with the air of those who have lost their way on dusty roads and road maps held upside down.
He divorced himself from his sweaty mare and went inside.
‘Don,’ he called with an aggressiveness unnatural to him, ‘aren’t I due for some leave? What about letting me off for the next few days? I’ve been thinking of riding across the mountains, down to the Murray.’
Don came out from his room grinning his ginger grin. ‘It’s all right by me. Eddie. But what ’ull Marcia have to say?’
‘Why Marcia? You’re the manager, aren’t you?’
‘She’s pretty possessive if she takes a fancy.’ Don couldn’t turn off the grin in the stubble which would have to wait till Saturday. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I expect it’s up to you in the long run — if you want to take the leave that’s due. And what odds any bloody Golsons?’ His teeth snapped shut on his conclusion.
Eddie and Don stood looking at each other from opposite ends of the brown passage.
‘See, Eddie? I won’t hold anything against yer.’
There was a whispering of dry-rotten woodwork, a dull protest from warped lino, the scratching, almost like spirit-writing, of hawthorn spines on glass. Prowse didn’t approach any closer, but steamed outward, it seemed.
Eddie presumed he could take his leave at any moment and that Don was prepared to face Marcia’s wrath. Eddie and Don understood each other in the brown, dry-rotted passage, while Peggy Tyrrell seared the mutton in a cavern beyond concern.
He set off the following day as Marcia, Joan, and Curly were hitting golf balls on the mini-course below the house. They were wearing the clothes, their limbs assuming the attitudes, of the Philistine upper class. Behind a hearty façade, they appeared somewhat lethargic as they put in time till lunch. (The Golsons would not have admitted to boredom because country life is virtuous.)