A Kindness Cup Read online

  Young Jenner said, offering his handkerchief towards the bloody nose, ‘It’s true, you know. My father reckons we’ll do much better for ourselves. Ever so much better.’

  ‘With your piddling bits of filthy Latin! With your sexless poets, your witless grammarians!’

  (He has quite a flow, Jenner commented later to Fred, for an uneducated man.) Now he said, ‘We can’t help it, sir. We’re the victims of parenthood.’

  Mr Buckmaster had moved to the wine-rack near the kitchen door. ‘I am an important man in this town,’ he stated redundantly. ‘I have thirty boys working for me on the farm. I must have a son who can control, share with me, know how to handle men.’

  Young Buckmaster was too absorbed in blood and shame to dribble anything but snivels into this.

  ‘Your father,’ Buckmaster pressed on, gulping some ferocious indigo liquid that always failed to make him feel better, and swinging on young Jenner, ‘is a step beyond my reasoning. The biggest property in the district. Two score of Kanaks hauling in his profits. What does it matter what his soft-haired boy does, eh? What the hell does it matter? You’ll sleep sweet on a sugar-bed as long as you live and you can take this fancy education from that snot-nosed teacher of yours and whatever it does for you, for it won’t do much but make you useless when it comes to dealing with men.’ (He was fond of dealing with men, was Buckmaster, and could handle women in much the same way.) ‘So I’d thank you to keep your privileged presence and fancy ideas’—the chessboard was scattered at this point across the veranda flooring—‘to yourself.’

  In protest Jenner cried out, ‘But it was for Mrs Buckmaster I called. My mother sent over a book she had asked for.’

  Mr Buckmaster, slowed by wine, thought this one over.

  ‘Sewing, you said?’ His son nodded sullenly. ‘Not reading? Not wasting the light?’ He mumbled into his glass some winey incantations and, as on cue, his wife came through suddenly from the front of the house to ignore her son’s bloodied face and begin stoking up the last of the fire to make tea. She was forty and ruined, not so much by her husband as by the country and the tyranny of it.

  A strange woman, the neighbours said, and would continue to say for her resistance both to them and to her husband who had used her as an incubator to breed sons but extracted only daughters except for this youngest, gulping mucus and tears. She continued to read—it seemed to her husband to be a sickness with her—despite him during those hours he was away being a man among men. For his part, he respected and almost feared those sinews of character she retained, but resented them. ‘My wife’s a great reader,’ he would boom among the husbands of cake-makers. It gave him cachet, he suspected, and somehow atoned for those moments when, with him biblically ranting, Old Testament sexually referring, she would laugh at him. He was a violent man, but imposed restraints that threatened to burst the blood out of his facial skin.

  Jenner, who at sixteen should not have understood but nevertheless did, handed him his cup of tea and sat sipping and watching from behind the light of the lamp.

  Young Fred was still sulking. He could wait till death for a formal apology from his father, who was sorry but could not say so, offering instead a kind of blessing with a supper hunk of bread and cheese. Fred took slow bites before deciding on speech. Finally: ‘Jilly Sweetman tells me there’s government troops coming up this way to flush out the blacks.’

  His father, who had known about this for some weeks, who had privately and quietly officially requested, said, ‘Now there’s a man’s job for you instead of this rubbishing school. They’re going to clear out the lot who’ve been raiding the coast farms. Drive them back north and west where they come from. Shoot the thieving bastards if they catch them at it.’

  ‘They’re still around,’ Fred said, trying eagerly for paternal favour. ‘The fellows have seen them out near Dorahy’s place. He encourages them, he does.’ Oh, the lad could spill the sins of others with horrible readiness. ‘And old Charlie Lunt’s as well. Sugar and flour and things. Tobacco. They give them, I mean.’

  ‘Do they indeed?’ asked his father, who knew.

  His wife was silently stirring knowledge in with sugar and tea.

  ‘Gin lovers?’ Mr Buckmaster asked shockingly of no one in particular; but his wife who could have endured any kind of lover at all said mildly, ‘They’re kind to them. They think they’re people.’

  ‘People!’

  ‘Yes. People. Christ’s skin was probably as dark as theirs.’

  ‘My God!’ Mr Buckmaster cried, inspecting her handsome intransigent features for irony. Christ was the New Testament revealed once a week by a minister who viewed him joylessly. He was presented as totally pale-skinned and it was to a white man they sang their whining hymns. ‘My God! Up north, you know, up in the rain-forest, hunting them down makes a pleasant way of filling in Sunday.’ It could be done straight after addressing his puritan white god. He enjoyed watching her wince. ‘What’s the bag, eh, mate?’ he pursued. ‘Ten? Eleven? Not as good as last week.’

  ‘Leaving them to rot,’ commented his wife, suddenly brutal and vicious with him. ‘Not even a hole in the ground!’

  ‘Ach!’ Buckmaster grunted. ‘You’re like all the other women after all.’ He felt unexpectedly pleased with this discovery. ‘Sentimental and stupid. First to squawk if a party of them raped you, though.’

  ‘I’ve never squawked at rape,’ his wife replied calmly, putting the supper cheese closer to her son’s friend, understanding his subtlety.

  There was a frightful silence. Young Jenner blushed. Even young Fred, thigh doodler of private and particular yearnings, was finding the scrubbed veranda floor of savage interest.

  ‘There would not be,’ Mr Buckmaster said finally and heavily, ‘room for much else.’ A winner, he felt, in front of Jenner’s bright intelligent eye.

  But the boy gave a last embarrassed gulp at his tea and said to the waiting room, ‘I must be getting back now.’ The innocence of his red hair was startling against his newly educated face. He stood up awkwardly and walked over to the landing uncertain whether to speak again would be the ultimate refinement in this uncivil war. But the wife spoke.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she said to him. ‘Thank your mother for me, and come again soon.’

  Young Jenner smiled once more, stopped smiling and said good-bye. As he cantered his horse into darkness, he understood that the blows dealt in metaphor were deadlier than the thwack of flesh on flesh. He could not ride fast enough to hear silence move in behind him while his soul lugged a new and doughy knowledge.

  DORAHY SUBMITS to this pull of fate.

  He packs a small bag, noting how one’s needs in age lie in inverse ratio to the expansion of the soul.

  He hopes. He boards a lumbering coastal vessel that rocks him out of his capital and, after a sea-shaken slumber, wakes after the third night to a sugarville morning of hard blue and yellow north of the tropic. From the salty deck he observes the wide reaches of blue bay water as the boat enters his destiny. Coastal scrub has thinned out its scraggy imprecision and has become the scraggier, scrubbier buildings of a town he has not entered for twenty years, which yet, as he watches the houses grow larger with approach, fills him with a nauseating nostalgia.

  He has kept apart as far as possible from the other passengers all the week, but now, as they join him along the railing, he feels obliged to share the excitement and the chatter. Hands point. Voices cry out. The boat noses its rusty way from harbour to river and river docks.

  There are only two others disembarking and he hopes to avoid them, knowing the town is full of pubs. Their reason for return is the same as his and already, conscious of his ambitions for solitariness, he wonders why he has come. His elderly legs wobble on this Friday morning gang-plank but they are the same legs that strolled through this town twenty years before, and he marvels that he is experiencing grief when, he supposes, rage would be the better thing. Turning his back firmly on the river and the docks, he walks steadi
ly up the slope past the warehouses and enters the town.

  The streets are busy with horses and big drays. There are people on bicycles bumping along the rough roads. Groggy from all this, he stands uncertain in sunlight, his bag at his feet. One should never go back. He decides this with vehemence and wonders then is he thinking of the psychic mistake of it or his own lack of charity. One does go back, he knows, again and again. One should forgive places as much as people.

  This place has much to be forgiven it.

  Terrible to sense the valetudinarian legs tentative along the footpath. But up here everyone saunters. He is relieved he does not look remarkable. It is a refusal to fight the heat which already is dealing him blow upon blow; rather a yielding to it. Already steam is rising from the baking township and its slow river. Already there is sweat along his hairline, the saddened back of his neck, trickling between his breasts.

  He feels reluctant to face his hotel yet, knowing its drabness already, the tired pots of fern, the bar-stink, the narrow bedroom with its spotted mirror. He walks on one hundred, two hundred yards and finds a tea-shop sluicing out the evening before. Rinsing the last stains of it, a thin girl has been doing penance with mop and bucket. She couldn’t care less about this elderly man with his thin face and thinner voice demanding tea. She isn’t forgiving anybody, refuses the credit of his smile, while slinging her bile across one table surface after the other with a rancid grey rag.

  But he tries.

  ‘It’s twenty years,’ he volunteers, ‘since I’ve been here.’ (Where are the banners, the bunting, the tuckets sounding at left?)

  She deals savagely with the counter and crashes the glass jars of sweets to one side.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she says.

  ‘It seems to have changed a lot. You notice things after that time.’ But what has he noticed? Bicycles, drays?

  ‘I don’t.’ She is grudging altogether. ‘Don’t notice any change, I mean.’

  ‘You’re young,’ he says. ‘Things happen so gradually you never see them when you’re young.’ Except for young Jenner, he remembers. Always remembering young Jenner with terrible clarity. ‘Coming back after a long time makes you see, pulls the scales off your eyes.’ He is conscious that he is talking too much.

  Young Jenner sits opposite him at the rocky table and says, ‘Sir, do something. Please. You’ll have to do something.’

  ‘Of course I’ll do something,’ he says and the girl pauses with her slop-rag and says, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’ Jenner fixes him with his terrible grey young eye and says, ‘You mustn’t hedge. You’re the only one.’

  ‘Me?’ He flexes his useless arms, thin at sixty and not much better at forty. ‘Boy,’ he says, ‘I could never have crossed the Rubicon. Never blasted my way across the Alps given an ocean of vinegar. But you are right, of course. It’s the mind that does the blasting. I must apologise, boy, for never being one of your muscle-bound footballers with their intemperate logic. I never matched up.’

  ‘You matched up,’ says young Jenner. ‘Please don’t apologise.’

  ‘Would you like,’ the girl asks, ‘a couple of aspirin?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I—it’s the heat, you know. Come from the south. Feelings run warm here.’ And he frightens her again, because she moves away a little distance before asking, ‘What are you up here for then?’

  ‘It’s Back to The Taws week,’ he says.

  ‘Oh that!’

  ‘Yes, that. We’re infesting in droves, I suppose. Migratory slaters crept out from under our little rocks. Full of sentiment.’

  ‘Sentiment!’ she scoffs. ‘Sentiment! Well, if that’s how you feel . . . My mum and dad talk about it. They’re part of it.’

  He looks up to smile his gentle gappy smile.

  ‘There must be dozens of us.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she agrees, and is kindly for a while with the dish-rag. ‘Oh, yes. My family came up here fifteen years ago just after I was born. They didn’t do much good, though. I feel there must be something better than this. They’re hoping they’ll see old friends. They had a lot they’d like to see again. Who went away, I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t have many friends,’ he admits, horrifying her; and young Jenner says, ‘Rubbish! Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Not rubbish, young Jenner,’ he says. ‘Not friends who mattered.’

  ‘You’ll make me ashamed of you,’ young Jenner says. ‘I thought you always said it was the saints who mattered.’

  ‘I must have been talking through my hat, boy. Wise after twenty years. It was the moneyed men who counted. The power stars. The rules makers. I had all the wrong friends.’

  Jenner blushes. He is still sixteen and cannot handle the unintentional insult.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Dorahy goes on. ‘All the wrong ones.’

  He pays for his tea and the girl watches him curiously as he sips.

  The courtroom begins to shift its walls inward.

  Do you ever, Mr Sheridan was pursuing with deadly interest, take any of the natives prisoner for no reason and without their consent? Would it be possible in a patch of scrub, perhaps?

  No, to your first question, Lieutenant Buckmaster replied. I only act on instructions.

  And the second question?

  No. I don’t think so. You might on a station. Have a chance, I mean.

  Without shooting them?

  I suppose so, Lieutenant Buckmaster said sulkily.

  But you said previously that shooting was the only thing they understood?

  I suppose so.

  Mr Sheridan smiled. Is it not very difficult, almost impossible, for a white man to take a blackfellow?

  I think it is very difficult, but on an open plain, say, you might run a blackfellow up a tree and you would soon get him then.

  Mr Sheridan took off his glasses, polished them and put them on again.

  I want to know whether you could take them alive.

  Hardly, Lieutenant Buckmaster said before he could pause to think.

  Oh, Mr Sheridan said. Indeed! And he glanced through his lenses sharply at this portly young man and hated him.

  Outside the courthouse a child began to bounce a ball against the timber walls. Mr Sheridan frowned.

  ‘Well, that’s it then,’ Mr Dorahy says pushing his cup to one side. Nothing stands between him now and the hotel. He gives the girl another smile and this time is repaid. Taking up his bag, he goes back into the sunlight and turns automatically in the direction he must go.

  Brutally the sun underscores his age and the hopelessness of this return. The shops still look like shanties, but some beneficent council has planted palms on centre islands in the main street that takes him seawards. And the sea still burns its blue acid.

  Beside the hotel office there is a group of people waiting. Like the remnants of some Eventide picnic, he thinks. There are faces he suspects knowing, pondering how ‘suspects’ is the right word here. Semantic priss, he tells himself, examining cautiously the faces, the maps—boundaries changed, contours altered—of those near him. Gracie Tilburn had won first prize at the Liedertafel singing ‘O for the wings of a dove’ which brought tears and the house down, and she is standing just ahead and to one side of him now with her blue bows and slender body vanished into rich fullness and plum silk. ‘How am I so sure?’ he asks himself. There is an unforgettable mole that had once the magic of an Addison patch high on the left cheek bone. Nothing else is recognisable. Not to him. He hopes he is wrong, for there is still a splendour if only in his memory.

  ‘Oh, Gracie, Gracie, Gracie,’ they had all warbled back at her afterwards, the choirs dispersed, the hall manager handing out weak lemon, the mothers sipping tea and crumbling biscuits.

  GRACIE WAS a nice girl. She knew it. Everyone in town knew it. She had allowed only a remnant of her forces to be scattered by Freddie Buckmaster who would appear sometimes to walk her home after Sunday Bible hunts. That’s what he called them, making
her laugh her magnificent laugh so that her rather long nose quivered and her doric neck, which troubled Freddie deeply, would throb. He troubled her too, his loutishness, the very racketing quality of it coursing through her blood in a dangerous manner.

  ‘And no boys, dear,’ her mother warned, along with a dozen other superstitious noli tangeres. ‘It will spoil your voice.’

  ‘Exactly what will spoil?’ Gracie had inquired.

  ‘I do not care to go into it,’ her mother said, but because she was superstitious felt obliged to add that, on the other hand, she had heard marriage enriched the voice, giving it darker tones.

  ‘My voice!’ Gracie admitted grudgingly, and already it was a burden. She suspected it was only a voice even though it was the best in those parts; and not until she had begun to soar her way through a jungle of butter-dish and cut-glass trophies was her assurance bolstered.

  Watching young Jenner the evening of the grand eisteddfod observing her with his lucid and innocent intelligence from four rows back while she sang, ignoring the bloody pianist, some of the loutishness in her, to which without any doubt at all Fred Buckmaster’s loutishness had responded, demanded more than that cool-eyed attention. For a while she returned his gaze, buffet for buffet it seemed, and felt her voice superbly detached, the head notes so effortless and purely accurate that she was conscious of some spiritual victory not only over him and all those others jammed in the hall, but also over the terrible brown and green distances eating away at the compass outside.

  Afterwards she had managed to be near him in the fragmented crowd.

  ‘That was beautiful,’ he said with such simplicity she could only believe him. She was surprised to feel ashamed.

  ‘She could go far,’ some thin man’s back was saying to her parents. Far? She had heard of cities. But she knew then he meant distances of the mind, long pilgrimages of the spirit.

  ‘Isn’t that your teacher?’ she whispered to young Jenner.