A Kindness Cup Page 8

  But the other man pursues. ‘Were you not,’ he nags pedantically, ‘part of the punitive force in those days, sidekicks to young Buckmaster?’

  ‘Where you should have been,’ Armitage answers flatly. ‘Christ! You’re not going to muck-rake like this!’ He slams his glass down in a mess of slop and spill. ‘We haven’t come back to go chewing over the past.’

  ‘I thought that was why we had come.’

  ‘Witty bastard, eh?’

  Gracie Tilburn is finally offended by this manifestation of maleness. She rises despite Dorahy’s ‘Don’t go.’

  The other three men are not even aware. Ted Ellis keeps grinning stupidly, but silk sweeps off and a lingering perfume plagues these perimeters of violence.

  ‘We all have to dig dirt and eat dirt,’ Dorahy counters. He is sick at heart with their reactions but feels doomed to thrust and thrust at the matter even until someone might quieten him with a blow. ‘People should face up to what they have done. I only want repentance. For his sake. He was a good man.’

  Romney swallows the remainder of his drink in a huge gulp that hurts the muscles of his throat. Everything about him is powerful, even his steady and obtuse refusals that drive Dorahy into more probing.

  Dorahy keeps flicking the sore place until one of them tells him to shut up about Lunt and, manly, buys him a second pacifier rum. He drinks it gloomily, watching the few foolish swimmers who have appeared on the beach.

  DORAHY IS fretting along the water-front on the second day, trying out the equation between blue water and blue air while he waits for Boyd. Words plague his mind. It is all words in angry buzzing debate, the most boneless of arguments, that sees no end of relief. He is sick with them, maddened by the circularity of theme that leaves him standing where he had begun. And it is on this point of noon hopelessness that Boyd’s clopping buggy noses him out as he shelters below a tattered palm.

  ‘Against my better judgment,’ Boyd says, leaning over the side. ‘Get in.’

  They sit in silence for a few moments while the horse snorts at flies. Dorahy removes his panama and flicks back the wet hair.

  ‘I was despairing,’ he offers.

  ‘A man must be mad,’ Boyd agrees. ‘But I’m keeping my word. My half-promise, that is.’

  Dorahy regards the sweating horse wonderingly.

  ‘How far, then, is it?’

  ‘Not far. About thirty. If we take it easy we’ll make it by tea-time. She’s pretty fresh.’

  ‘So he’s as close as that! Well!’ It is anti-climactic after all.

  ‘Close enough for what you’re trying to do,’ Boyd says. ‘But we’ll have to stop the night to rest the horse. It could be quite pleasant—little fishing village north-east of The Leap.’ He looks hard at Dorahy. ‘You’re sure you still want to go? You know what you’re doing?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ He looks at Boyd in return. Perhaps the maggot will stop gnawing when . . . ‘It’s very good of you,’ he says.

  ‘It is,’ Boyd agrees. ‘Something tells me it is the wrong thing.’

  He gives the reins a shake and the buggy pulls out smartly on the dirt road.

  Jogging between the cane-field hedges from which heat and sweetness pour out, Dorahy confronts his demon with the pacifics of landscape, absorbing the scattered farmhouses, the kids waving from fence perches. He refuses to see himself as a trouble-maker. Wasn’t that what Boyd had suggested? Already, in his dedication to seek reprisal or justice, he has involved himself so thoroughly in the politics of this small town it could be as if he had never left. When the cane-fields give out to the scrubbier landscape that looks as if it has only been pencilled in, the satisfaction of alienation comes back to him.

  ‘This is good of you,’ Dorahy says once more, glancing at Boyd’s stubby profile.

  ‘We’ve agreed on that. But I’m still not sure why I—or even you, for that matter—am doing it.’

  ‘You’re doing it for the same reason as me, I suppose. Or rather, I suspect.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Boyd answers.

  He has slowed the horse down to a walk. The flies keep pestering beneath the brims of their hats. Dust puffs and filters and becomes a small cloud behind them. The last farmhouse has been left behind and the loneliness of trees reaches in to them on the narrow road. In the sultry air Dorahy finds himself nodding. Once or twice he jerks awake when Boyd flicks the horse into a trot and is aware of the other man sucking stolidly at his pipe, his face set like a compass needle on the twisting road ahead.

  An hour trudges by. Mandarana looms up, its great hulk black on their right. Both men look and then ignore. Their thoughts are twinned for the moment and they each see the Sunday landscape, the body, the men on the peak.

  ‘It’s just past here, the turn-off,’ Boyd says. ‘There’s a bit of a creek in a mile or so. I think we’ll stop a while and give the old girl a breather. The road gets pretty rough after this. It’s not much more than a track.’

  Boyd is strangely regretful now he has come so far, and he takes his eyes off the rutty road for a minute to inspect the map of Dorahy’s face. The sour gentleness is implacable. ‘God help him,’ he prays humorously to himself. ‘He’s obsessed and I am yielding to his vice.’ He guides the horse steadily and pessimistically on, but she is more skilled than he and picks her own way delicately between pot-holes. The road gives its own mandates.

  On a grassy spit of the creek Boyd unharnesses the horse, hobbles her, and lets her crop the feed along the bank. The two men stretch out beneath a tree, smoking quietly, trying out their obsessions in silence. Above, the sky has become sulky with a huge boil-up of cloud from the sea, heavy cumulus dark with rain on its underside. Even in the hollow they are aware of a freshening in the air as small pre-storm winds rattle the trees.

  ‘I’ll make a cuppa,’ Boyd says. He fetches a billy and tea from the back of the buggy and in a few minutes has a small fire blazing between rocks by the water.

  ‘How far now?’ Dorahy asks. He is beginning to feel the mendicant.

  ‘About the same distance again,’ Boyd says. He hands Dorahy a tin mug, fills his own from the billy, and sips, speculating on obsession and the places it takes one. ‘There are a couple of big cane farms out this way, two of the biggest in the district. I suppose old Charlie makes out with that and the few old fisherboys who live in his village. He never wanted much. Just to be let alone, I think.’

  ‘And I’m not doing that!’ Dorahy sounds resentful.

  ‘You said it,’ Boyd answers with a laugh. ‘I’m merely the guide.’

  Warm rain-splash falls on them suddenly. The fire hisses between the rocks.

  ‘That’s it!’ Boyd says, looking up at the sky. ‘I’d better harness up or we’ll get soaked.’

  Carefully he douses the fire with sand and, genial about Dorahy’s uselessness, hitches his horse back between the shafts, and guides the buggy up the slope onto the track.

  ‘Old girl!’ he exclaims in sudden affection, slapping her fat rump, and momentarily preferring her to his bedevilled passenger. He hauls up the buggy hood and takes his seat, still clutching his unfinished mug of tea. Dorahy climbs in beside him, and the rain, bursting above them, drums hard on the canvas and bounces off the buggy steps.

  ‘Shall we sit it out or go?’ Boyd asks.

  ‘Go,’ Dorahy replies. He is alive with fever, a spiritual temperature that flushes only the soul. He could be shaking, but he ignores this, setting his eyes on the last leg of the journey like a frantic pilgrim.

  The horse is frisky after her rest, but the track, cutting through mountain country to the sea, argues every foot of the way. It is not until they have come through the worst of it and the ruts widen into a dusty road leading to the east that the horse can sharpen into a trot, bowling them briskly into ploughed country black under the rain. Sheds stand on sky-lines. Three paddocks away a shuttered farmhouse turns its back. Three more hills and they can glimpse the sea below and to the north and east of them. Dorahy shi
fts restlessly on his seat. But it is another half-hour before the buggy rolls onto the wide sea-gazing clearing with its half-dozen shacks and the shanty of a store they have come to find.

  In the easing rain, Boyd hitches his horse to the store-post and waits for Dorahy, who is sensing the full purpose of the journey at this moment, not merely the country ride they have come, and now the grey spread of sea. Boyd leads the way into the store, brushing heavily against the sacking drape that is hauled roughly to one side, and, in that inner twilight against which they can hear the steady comment of reef waters, rings a small handbell on the counter.

  From the back of the shop there is a sound—cough? cry?—and someone is heard walking through.

  Dorahy has his mouth ready to smile—the crisis of the dream—but it is a young woman who appears, a full-blood with crisp hair and a deeply pigmented skin. She looks at the two men standing there in front of the tinned goods, the grocery packets, puzzles for a moment, and then smiles at Boyd.

  ‘Remember me, Mary?’ he asks. ‘Willie Boyd. How are you?’ Amusedly he catches onto Dorahy’s surprised eyes. ‘This is Kowaha’s little girl,’ he explains. ‘Grown up.’

  In this lost settlement washed up by the sea, the introductions are a banal joke.

  ‘This is Mr Dorahy who knew you years ago.’

  But Dorahy is back at Mandarana’s foot gazing down at the shattered body, the outrage of it, the baby in Boyd’s arms. Something like tears is threatening. He cannot speak, only smile and stiffly take her hand into his. Shyly she draws back.

  ‘Charlie around?’ Boyd asks. ‘Tell him there’s a couple of friends.’

  She smiles again, turning to go softly through the rear door of the shop and into the house. Within the minute they can hear his clumping irregular footsteps coming through.

  Lunt has grown older. The seams on his face match those in Dorahy’s soul as he takes Lunt’s hand. Boyd watches them both curiously and sighs for the matter of it. But Lunt is full of astonishment.

  ‘The surprise of it!’ he keeps saying. ‘What a day! The surprise of it!’ He is all smiles. ‘Come through,’ he invites them, opening the flap in the counter for them. ‘Come through.’

  His parlour is tiny. There are two chairs, a small table and some books. The room is jammed already. A small window looks out on a shaggy yard with a lemon-tree. ‘If this is the last-post nest,’ Dorahy thinks with pity—which is misplaced—‘then the man is caged.’

  He wants to open something to let him out and it seems a pedantic shame merely to be going through how-are-you motions when inside him there is a voice shouting, ‘Remember when—?’

  Lunt is slower, too; yet there is a deliberateness about him signalled by his face that has been hewn into a mask of forgiveness and tolerance despite those small lines of withdrawal. He says, Yes he had heard of the Back to The Taws week, and No he had not received any letter or invitation. Which amuses him. He supposes he could have gone up had he wanted. He laughs creakingly and listens with a smile to the simplicity of Dorahy’s invitation while Boyd frowns with annoyance.

  ‘Well, I was waiting to be asked,’ he admits. ‘But you don’t want me back to please me,’ he accuses shrewdly. ‘Only to please yourself.’

  Boyd has to laugh with relief. ‘That’s exactly what I say, Charlie. Don’t listen to him.’

  Dorahy feels ashamed. But it is a temporary shame. He is mounted and away.

  ‘It’s justice I want done.’

  ‘You want exposure,’ Lunt says bluntly. ‘Fancy, after all this time!’ He marvels at it. ‘I’ve grown like an oyster onto this bit of reef,’ he says, and looks past them at the backyard, needing no other solace. ‘Still,’ he adds, ‘it’s nice to be asked—even for the wrong reasons. Very nice. I thought I’d been forgotten.’

  ‘Not that,’ says Boyd, who is guilty of neglect.

  ‘That young woman,’ Lunt says looking at Dorahy, ‘Mary. Boyd’s probably told you she’s Kowaha’s child. It’s a long story. I won’t bother you with it. But she came to me quite voluntarily about six years ago and asked if she could look after me. The Jenners had her till then. But I suppose you know all this. What I wanted to tell you’—he smiles at the memory—‘she still has that medal you gave her. Dorahy’s luck. Remember?’

  Dorahy remembers. He can only nod.

  ‘No,’ Lunt goes on. ‘No. Not what you’re thinking. She helps in the shop and cooks for me, but that’s all. She has a husband now. Works on the cane.’ He thinks of the girl, years ago, who had never, not ever—and his face saddens.

  Dorahy is silent. Something tells him he will win by waiting.

  ‘Look,’ Lunt says and he chuckles, ‘I might come if I could bring her, too. That would make them sit up.’

  ‘They’d use her to rip you apart,’ Boyd warns. ‘They’d say you’re a gin lover and grind your face in it.’

  ‘It has been ground before,’ Lunt says simply.

  ‘Think about it,’ Dorahy pleads, sensing a weakening.

  Lunt only smiles. ‘You two,’ he says, ‘you’re not going back tonight. We’ll have a yarn, eh? I can make you shakedowns on the veranda and we’ll have a bite to eat. It’s been a long time.’

  Boyd grimaces as if the pain has been transferred to him.

  ‘We’d love to stay,’ he says. ‘Ignore this mad bastard who has his axe to grind. We’ve come to see you.’

  Lunt looks thoughtful. ‘It’s nice to have been asked, anyway,’ he repeats. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be coming to please Tom. Just myself. Maybe a change away from here would do me good. I’ve only been away once in the last eighteen years. A man rots a bit.’

  Dorahy decides to press home. ‘Then you may come?’ He is greedy as a child.

  ‘Oh, my God, Tom,’ Boyd groans. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Lunt says. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’

  Boyd sighs and shrugs. Is there some especial charisma in Dorahy, some magnetic tug that draws others like filings? Why, there’s enough of the irritant in the fellow, he knows, to alienate people by scores. He understands this and yet still sees himself the willing courier drawn by some particular ascetic quality in the man. Fanaticism always has its disciples, he thinks bitterly. But why me?

  THE SCHOOL OF ARTS is jammed with protestations of loyalty.

  Someone has tacked bunting round the stage where a table and chairs have been set up for the welcoming committee. The whole room has a faded and worn-out look, but no one’s complaining.

  There are three hours yet before the committee begins its self-adulatory session of whoopee.

  And perhaps three hours are enough for Buckmaster, who has heard of Dorahy’s proposal to bring Lunt up for the opening hoo-ha. He rages inwardly and silently, a rage all the worse for its containment, and goes to Sweetman’s house where he will renew his anger.

  Sweetman’s calm refuels Buckmaster.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing now that can be done. They can stir up the past a little, I suppose, but everyone here will be beyond it. We’re beyond it.’

  They are pacing about the front garden, monks of misrule, amid the sterile ambience of scentless gorgeous tropicana. The sky is crazy with stars.

  ‘He must be stopped,’ mad Buckmaster says. ‘When are they due back?’

  ‘Benjy Wilson says they set off up the coast some time yesterday. They should be back soon—if they’re coming.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to intercept them.’

  Sweetman snaps off an allamanda bloom and examines it so minutely he might be seeking his salvation in the flower’s golden centre. Buckmaster’s clenched fists whiten with the effort not to dash it from him—salvation and flower.

  ‘My boy says to count him in,’ he continues. ‘He’s willing to do something.’

  ‘What?’

  Buckmaster lets the question pass. He’d let a lot of questions pass in his day, politically practising.

  ‘Can I count on you?’ he asks suddenly.
>
  Sweetman worries this one. ‘To do anything now,’ he says, ‘might be a lot worse than simply letting him come, celebrate, if that’s what he’s here for, and go away again. In any case he might have refused. Tom Dorahy can’t force him to come.’

  ‘But it’s not Lunt I’m worried about,’ Buckmaster says. ‘It’s that bloody schoolteacher. He always was a great nose-shover into other people’s affairs.’

  ‘A stinking, righteous man,’ Sweetman says with a smile. ‘You hate them, don’t you? Well, maybe Boyd’s horse will lame or an axle break. Then your problem will be solved. But count me out of your plans. Do what you like. Only be warned, Jim, don’t mess up things for the rest of us.’

  Yet Boyd’s buggy is immune to bone-pointing. It comes back into town an hour after sunset and in the deeper dark takes Dorahy and Lunt home to Boyd’s. And it is then, as they drag cramped limbs down and move into the shadow of trees, that Dorahy receives the first shattering blow and Lunt the second.

  There is nothing Boyd can do: there is only the sound of the attackers’ horses cantering away. He shouts for his wife and proceeds to lug Dorahy over to the steps. Then his wife appears and bends over Lunt, who has managed to sit up. Her stooped figure contains elements of tribal lament.

  Dorahy comes to slowly. His head is an enormous throbbing pain which he holds in both hands.

  ‘Well,’ Boyd says, unable to keep the satisfaction of being right from his voice, ‘that’s the first of it. Don’t say you weren’t warned. A taste of stay-off, I wouldn’t be surprised. Do you still want to go to the welcome-in?’

  Boyd’s wife has come down into the dewy garden with a bowl of water and bits of rag with which she is making wet plasters. She moves from Lunt to Dorahy, bathing and murmuring. At fifty the beauty of her bones is even more apparent, and the tenderness she has always felt for Lunt springs like an act of contrition in the movements of tending. She recalls him as he was twenty years ago and is surprised how the moral rigidities of that time have moulded themselves into deeper statements.

  ‘Of course they will be going,’ she says. ‘Especially because of this.’