Corroboree (3 page)

Then a door banged; and another.

Eyre walked a little way up the garden path; then took off his Manila straw hat and held it over his chest, partly out of respect and partly as an unconscious gesture of self-protection. He was dressed in his Saturday afternoon best: a white cotton suit, with a sky-blue waistcoat with shiny brass buttons, from the tailoring shop next to Waterloo House. His high starched collar was embellished with a blue silk necktie which had taken him nearly twenty minutes to arrange.

‘Is anything up?' he asked Mrs McMurtry.

Mrs McMurtry let out a throat-wrenching sob. Then she flapped down her apron, and her face was as hot and wretched as a bursting pudding.

The mutton-and-turnip pie!' she exclaimed.

Eyre glanced, perplexed, towards the house. The mutton-and-turnip pie?' he repeated.

‘
Moooo!
' sobbed Mrs McMurtry. Eyre came over and laid his arm around her shoulders, trying to be comforting. Her candy-striped kitchen-dress was drenched in perspiration, and her scrawny fair ringlets were stuck to the sides of her neck. In midsummer, cooking a family luncheon over a wood-burning stove was just as gruelling as stoking the boilers of a Port Lincoln coaster.

That's not Mr Lindsay I hear?' asked Eyre.

Mrs McMurtry snuffled, and sobbed, and nodded frantically.

‘But surely Mr Lindsay wasn't due home until Friday week!'

‘Well,
mooo
, he's back now, aint he; came back this morning in the blackest of humours; too hot, says he, and nothing to show for a month's dealings in Sydney but expenses; and he kicks the boy for not grooming the horses as good as he wanted; and he kicks the dog for sleeping in the pantry while he was gone; and then he shouts at Mrs Lindsay for letting Miss Charlotte dress herself up like a fancy-woman,
mooo
, and for walking out without his say-so, with only the boy for chaperone; and then he sees that
it's mutton-and-turnip pie, and what he says is,
mooo
, what he says is, “I hates the very
sight
of mutton-and-turnip pie, so help me,' that's what he says, and he tosses it clean out of the kitchen window and upside-down it lands plonk in the veronica.'

Eyre took his hand away from Mrs McMurtry's sweaty shoulders and wiped it unobtrusively on his jacket. He looked towards the house again and bit his lip. This was extremely bad news. He had wanted to tell Lathrop Lindsay about his freshly flowered affection for Charlotte in his own particular way. Mr Lindsay was unpredictable, irascible, and no lover of ‘sterlings', those who had newly arrived from England, or what he called ‘the burrowing class', by which he meant clerks and salesmen and junior managers. Mr Lindsay had a special dislike of Eyre, and not just because Eyre was a ‘sterling', or because he worked as a clerk for the South Australian Company down at the port. He disliked Eyre's manner, he disliked Eyre's smartly cut clothes, and he very much disliked Eyre's bicycle. It was probably fair to say that he disliked Eyre even more than he disliked mutton-and-turnip pie, and for that reason Eyre had wanted to prepare the ground for his announcement with ingenuity and care. He had already run two or three useful errands for Mrs Lindsay; and advised her where to find a reliable gardener, one who could conjure up English primroses as well as acacia. And back at his rooms on Hindley Street he had stored up five bottles of Lathrop Lindsay's favourite 1824 port-wine, which he had obtained in barter from the bo'sun of the
Illyria
in exchange for two nights' use of his bed, and an introduction to a benign and enormously fat Dutch girl called Mercuria.

Now all this expense and inconvenience had gallingly gone to waste; and Eyre cursed his rotten luck.

‘I never saw Mr Lindsay in such a bate,' protested Mrs McMurtry.

One of the upstairs windows was lifted again. Mrs
Lindsay leaned out, white and fraught, with her primrose hair-ribbon halfway down the side of her head.

‘Mr Walker!' she called, breathily. ‘You'll have to make yourself scarce! My husband has come back, and I'm afraid that he's terribly angry at Charlotte for having stepped out with you. Please—you must go at once!'

At that moment, another window opened up, on the other side of the house. It was Lathrop Lindsay himself, crimson with indignation.

‘What's all this calling-out?' he demanded. ‘Phyllis!' Then he caught sight of Eyre standing in the garden with his hat over his heart and he roared incontinently, ‘You! Mr Walker! You stay there! I want to have a word with you!'

His window banged down again. Mrs Lindsay waved to Eyre in mute despair, and then she closed her window, too. Eyre took two or three steps in retreat, towards the garden gate, but then stopped, and decided to stand his ground. If he were to flee, and pedal off on his bicycle, he would never have the chance to walk out with Charlotte again. He had to face up to Mr Lindsay; one way or another. Not only face up to him, but win him over.

My God, he thought. How am I going to convince a snorting bull like Lathrop Lindsay that I could make him a suitable son-in-law? He cleared his throat, and wiped sweat away from his upper lip with the back of his sleeve. Mrs McMurtry had stopped mooo-ing now, and was staring at him with her hands on her hips with a mixture of suspicion and pity.

‘He'll eat you up alive,' Mrs McMurtry told him. The last fellow Charlotte walked out with, Billy Bonham, he was a new chum like you; and Mr Lindsay cracked three of his ribs with a walking-cane, so help me. And he was a lot better connected than what
you
are.'

Eyre gave her a quick, dismissive scowl. She hesitated, huffed, and then flounced off back to the house, swinging a cuff at Yanluga as he re-appeared through the shrubbery.
‘Sterlings and Abbos,' she grumbled. ‘Bad luck to the lot of ‘em!'

Yanluga came cautiously up towards Eyre, biting his lips in apprehension. He was only fifteen but he had a natural way with horses, a way of calming them and whispering to them. Charlotte said that she had once seen him whistle to a kangaroo on the south lawn; and freeze the animal where it was, head raised, and then walk right up to it, and speak to it gently, although she hadn't been able to hear what he had said. He was very black, Yanluga, a wonderful inky black, with bushy hair and a face that defied you not to smile at him. Eyre's mother would have called him ‘sonsy'.

Only Lathrop Lindsay found Yanluga irritating; but then Lathrop found the whole world irritating; and not only because of his inflamed piles. Lathrop had been dispatched to Australia by the Southwark Trading Company as a polite but very firm way of telling him that his books were not in order; and ever since then he had fought a ceaseless and irascible crusade to re-establish his self-esteem, both social and moral. Lathrop spoke a great deal of God, and Mary Magdalene, and also of Surrey, which he missed desperately; but more usually of the natural superiority of those who were neither clerks, nor black.

Yanluga said, gently, ‘I'm sorry, Mr Walker, sir.'

‘Sorry?' asked Eyre. ‘What for?'

‘Mr Lindsay asked me, did I take you and Miss Charlotte out for rides, sir, and I said yes. And then he asked me, did we have a chaperone, sir, and I said no.'

Eyre ruffled Yanluga's wiry hair. ‘Don't you worry yourself,' he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘It's better that you told the truth, in any case.'

‘Sir, one of my cousins knows Steel Bullet the Mabarn Man.'

‘Is that so? I didn't think that anybody knew Steel Bullet—not to speak to; I thought he hunted on his own; and never let anybody find out where he was.'

‘I tell you the truth, sir. One of my cousins knows Steel
Bullet, sir, and maybe if you paid enough money, Steel Bullet would come in the night and kill Mr Lindsay for you, sir.'

Steel Bullet the Mabarn Man was a legend in South-Western Australia; and whalers had already brought tales of his horrifying behaviour as far east as Adelaide. He was an Aboriginal called Alex Birbarn, and he was said to possess the magical powers of a Mabarn Man—including the ability to fly hundreds of miles at night, and to change himself into anything he wished, such as a rock, or an anthill. So far he was credited with the murders of seventy people, and he was notorious for following kangaroo hunts, and making off with the kangaroo skin or sometimes the whole kangaroo before the exhausted hunters realised they had a thief in their midst.

Eyre said, ‘I don't want to kill Mr Lindsay, Yanluga. I just want to persuade him to be reasonable.'

‘Mr Lindsay never reasonable, sir. Never.' He shook his head violently.

‘Well, yes, I know that, but what can I do?'

‘Call the Mabarn Man, sir. Steel Bullet will chop him up into very small pieces for you, sir. Please, sir. Everybody would be very happy to see you marry Miss Charlotte, sir. Especially Miss Charlotte, sir.'

Eyre looked at Yanluga carefully. ‘Miss Charlotte told you that?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You're not making it up?'

‘Honour of Joseph, honour of Jesus, honour of God who always sees us.'

‘Hm,' said Eyre. He pushed a finger and thumb into his tight waistcoat pocket, and took out sixpence, which he held up for a moment, so that Yanluga could see the sunlight wink on it; and which he then tossed up into the air, and smartly caught.

‘You can do something for me, young Yanluga. You can go tell Miss Charlotte that I absolutely adore her; you know what adore means? Well, never mind, just say it. And you
can tell her to meet me at ten o'clock tonight by the back fence, and not to worry about Old Face-Fungus.'

‘Face-Fun-Gus?' Yanluga frowned. He was one of the better-educated Nyungars, but he found it difficult to follow what Eyre was saying when he spoke in his broadest Derbyshire accent.

Eyre slapped him on the back. ‘Never mind about that,' he said, impatiently. ‘Just make sure that Charlotte's outside the back gate at ten. Tell her to dress warmly: it can get devilish cold at that time of night. But I'll bring a blanket and a bottle of wine. Come on now, cut along, here's Mr Lindsay.'

Lathrop Lindsay was bustling down the front steps of the house, clutching a black-lacquered cane in both hands, his knuckles spotted with white. ‘Now look here,' he called, and then he waved his stick at Yanluga, and cried, ‘Be off with you! You idle black bastard!'

He steamed up to Eyre with all the boisterous energy of a small tug boat, his pale eyes bulging, his mouth tight. He wore tight white cotton trousers and a scarlet embroidered waistcoat, and a red necktie. His bald head was beaded with sweat.

‘Now then, Mr Lindsay,' said Eyre, backing away a little, and lifting his hands to show that he surrendered.

‘Now then yourself, you blackguard,' puffed Lathrop. ‘You and your beguiling ways. You and your yessir nossir. And what happens the moment I'm away? Take advantage, don't you? Yessir. That's what you're interested in, isn't it, courting my daughter; nothing to do with shipping or business, nossir. And to think I believed you honest. To think I said to Mrs Lindsay, not a day before I went away, there's a trustworthy chap, albeit a new chum, and still white as milk. Yessir.'

‘Mr Lindsay, please, I think there's been a frightful misunderstanding,' Eyre protested. Then, more persuasively, he said, ‘Please.'

‘Well, then?' Lathrop demanded. ‘Did you go walking out with Charlotte or didn't you?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And did you take a chaperone with you?'

‘No sir.'

‘And what, pray, do you think that does for my daughter's reputation? Bad enough, by Heaven, that she walks out with one of the burrowing class. Bad enough, by God. But to walk out unattended, when anything might happen.
Anything;
and you know what
anything
means. Anything means shady goings-on, at least in the common mind, at least in the vulgar imagination, that's what anything means.'

‘Mr Lindsay—' Eyre began.

‘Mr Lindsay nothing,' Lathrop interrupted him. ‘You'll be off at once, or I'll have the dogs on you. And you'll not be back, nossir. If I catch you once around this property; just once; if I catch you sniffing around my daughter; well you whelp I'll have you arrested by God and locked up, yessir, and beaten, too; whipped.'

‘Eyre stood his ground. ‘Mr Lindsay,' he said, ‘I love your daughter. I love her with all my heart. And, what's more, I believe that she loves me in return.'

Lathrop stared at Eyre like a madman. His hairy nostrils widened, and his whole body seemed to quake uncontrollably.

‘Mr Lindsay—' Eyre cautioned him. But Lathrop grew redder and redder, and his eyes popped, and with peculiarly stiff movements he raised his cane in his right hand, and began to advance on Eyre with dragging, paralytic steps; as if his entire nervous system had been congested by sheer rage.

‘You dare to speak to me of love,' he boiled. ‘You dare to come to my house on a bicycle and speak to me of love. By God, you young cur, I'll take the skin off your back.'

‘Mr Lindsay, please, you're not yourself,' Eyre told him, retreating towards the garden gate. This is not you, Mr Lindsay. Not the calm and ordered Mr Lindsay, of Waikerie Lodge.'

He backed quickly out of the garden gate, and closed it.
The two of them faced each other over the low white-painted palings; Eyre trying every possible expression of appeasement in his facial repertoire; Lathrop Lindsay gradually coming to the point of spontaneous combustion.

‘Mr Lindsay, I don't know what to say,' said Eyre. ‘I imagined that I was a friend of the family. You gave me to
believe
that I was. I apologise if I mistook your charm and your courtesy for friendship. Perhaps you were just being nice to me for the sake of politeness. Please; it's all my fault and I apologise. Can't we start afresh?'

Lathrop threw open the garden gate and began to stalk after Eyre along the dusty sidewalk.