‘All right, Ed. All right!’ Again the manager, Mr Prowse had matters in hand. ‘You got yer bags. You’ll get yer ticket on the train. I’ll shove off.’
As he did.
Eddie turned his back on the diminishing trail of dust, and the Mail arrived eventually, the guard descending to jolly the ascending passenger.
‘Not offn we get one at Fossickers, sir.’
After the two had heaved up the baggage, he flagged the engine.
Eddie Twyborn sat in the corner of his empty compartment and was rushed away, past the skeleton trees, the hill with its cairn of lichened rocks, faces hungry for events outside a shack at a level crossing. A bronzed, exhausted, country evening gave way to night, which had the smell of soot.
The brown-paper parcel had fallen off the seat on to the floor. He ought to pick it up.
He was too passive, it seemed. Jolted onward, through Bungendore and the rest, he closed his eyes. But did not sleep. Sleep might always be denied him, except in the form of dreams, or nightmares.
Sydney
5 October 1929
Dear, dear Mrs Lushington,
It was so kind of you to write to me and send the snap of your little boy. I do feel for you, deeply — a claim which no doubt you’ll interpret as hypocrisy, grief being such a personal matter we must bear our own; others can sympathise while only superficially understanding.
I keep returning to the picture of this little boy so dear to you, and so cruelly taken when his life seemed assured. I believe he has the stamp of both of you, in equal parts. Not that I know either of you, reallty—Mr Lushington only on abysmal formal occasions when mere women are admitted to a gentleman’s club; you even less, in spite of an unacceptable encounter best forgotten, and the time you appeared for Sunday luncheon in the dining room of the Hotel Australia, and scanned the menu, and blew smoke at us from under monkey fur, and left, for some reason, contemptuously. I am not criticising, dear Mrs Lushington, what at that stage would have been my own attitude. I think I was only resentful of the behaviour of one I might have liked to know.
If I can claim to know your husband slightly, it is from those pompous functions in the men’s club; better since you sent me your little boy’s picture, for I went at once to Edward’s snapshot album, and there came across those ridiculous, touching glimpses of men at play while taking themselves seriously: drinking schooners of beer leaning on the bar of a country pub, smirking over the tennis net as they clumsily protect the girls who have been their partners, never so exposed as when posturing in thighboots and all that mackintoshery beside some mountain stream with the trout they have ravished from it. (I know I’d stand accused in any court, but don’t think, Mrs Lushington, that I don’t love my judge.)
If my impressions of your husband are inclined to fade, and my impression of yourself remains distinct, it is because that snap taken by my mind’s eye as you and the Twyborns sat in the dining room of the Hotel Australia shortly after my son’s return is as clear as the moment itself. That is how I see you and as I recognise you again in the snap you sent me — unmistakably your features — and those of Mr Lushington.
I believe I can detect in your letter hopes that we might meet and found a relationship on the sadness and disappointment we both know about. Let me assure you, Mrs Lushington, that much as I sympathise with you, and grieve for you as far as one can, it would be a vast mistake.
What I would like to convey to you is that losing a child in death is so much better than losing a grown — what shall I say? reasoning child, to life. As happened to me for the second time. And to my darling Edward, of course. Though I think men must — they can only feel it less, for not experiencing it in their depths — dragged bloody from their own entrails.
Oh I mustn’t go on like this. You ask what news I have of Eddie. I can only answer NOTHING. As the first time, so the second. He is swallowed up. Whether in death or life, it is the same. We should not have aspired to possess a human being. Your memories, I think, are more cherishable because more tender. He did not know enough, mine knew too much of what there is to know.
Thank you, Marcia, for the letter, and the snap, and for sharing your despair, which I expect time will help us quench in the humdrum.
Eadie Twyborn
P.S. Let me put on record that, much as I disapproved of the monkey fur, I would have loved to wear it, and envied the one who did.
Part III
With the exception of the cook, a floating member of the household, and usually young, lusty, insensitive, none of the occupants of Ninety-One any longer enjoyed the luxury of sleep. In Nanny’s case it scarcely mattered: senility was her solace, so, at least, her former charges had decided for her. Maud and Kitty were the ones who suffered, but how much worse insomnia might have been without the deplorable trafficking opposite.
At first they had been prepared to pit their prudery, their virtue, against the goings-on at Eighty-Four. Kitty’s virtue in her younger days hadn’t been much more than a theory which members of her class professed in order to divert censure, and an admirable arrangement it was, till with age and reduced circumstances she suddenly found herself set cold in the aspic of fact. As far as anybody knew, Maud the elder, flat and plain from the beginning, had never had the chance to test her virtue, and nobody, not even Kitty, would have been indiscreet enough to probe. Now she was safe, as indeed was Kitty, though less willing to resign herself to safety. Only relatives reviving a sense of duty called on the two sisters, the Ladies Maud Bellasis and Kitty Binns, for Kitty had acquired a dubious husband, at whose disappearance she had been brave or proud enough not to revert to the family name.
All this was ancient history, to which the ladies actually belonged while liking to see themselves as ‘modern’. Even Maud was given to smearing a trace of lipstick over the cracks in pale, rather tremulous lips, while Kitty went the whole hog, and blossomed like a tuberous begonia. If she no longer enjoyed sleep, and teeth made eating a difficulty, she could toy with the thought of shocking. But whom? Most of the shockable were dead. Unless, under their lipstick, Kitty and Maud themselves, who were intermittently shocked by what Kitty visualised, and the timorous Maud only dared suspect was going on at Eighty-Four.
As what was happening, however discreetly, in the house opposite became unmistakable, the sisters had considered protesting, going to the police, taking their Member a petition from a neighbourhood roused by disgust for overt immorality. But could the neighbourhood, Beckwith Street in particular, be roused? Colonel Bewlay might even be patronising the house in question, his wife too shortsighted or too simple to know; the Creeses were too common, the Feverels too much abroad, the shopkeepers at the end of the street sufficiently business-minded to welcome the woman’s advent — her drink orders alone.
So the noble sisters lapsed in their intention to resist corruption and parade their virtue, and the house opposite became good for a giggle over their own drinks. For Kitty had dived headlong into the cocktail age, while Maud sipped a nervous sherry on occasions when nephews and nieces remembered the old girls in Beckwith Street.
‘We’ll just have to be broadminded.’
‘But do you see anything, Aunt Maud?’ asked a tickled nephew.
‘Oh no, we don’t see. But we’re inclined to hear in the small hours. Last night I definitely heard screams.’
‘I didn’t — but perhaps there were,’ Kitty reluctantly admitted.