Swords and Crowns and Rings (24 page)

For ever, for ever. The words were like hammer blows on Mr Moy's heart. He had to sit down in the waiting-room to recover. It was only because of the curious looks of other travellers, huddled over the surly coals in the eight-inch grate as they were waiting for the local, that at last he went out to his motor.

His mother had known when the crane dumped the bale of goods on his father at the docks, dropping the spoon with which she was stirring the soup and giving a bawl that made the hair of every person in the kitchen stand on end.

‘Dead, dead, me Pat's dead!' she had shrieked.

Now Mr Moy felt the same way. He felt he had seen his daughter for the last time; that she would die with that abortion, and it would be his fault that he had not stood up to Isobel. It was the first time he had entered the august country of grief and he was taken with a huge bewilderment.

Though he had prudently put the old rug over the bonnet of the motor, the engine was cold. He cranked ineffectually for a while until some hanger-on at the station—blue trousers, dirty striped cuffs, a porter perhaps, Mr Moy really didn't see him—jovially slapped a brutal paw beside his and with a couple of tremendous heaves got the engine going.

‘Thanks, much obliged,' Mr Moy muttered, and gave the man a shilling.

He was half-way home when a coldness seized his chest and ran down his left arm. He managed to pull over towards the side of the road before the urbane sky shot upwards and vanished from sight.

Mrs MacNunn's appearance had been like a miracle. Cushie wanted to pray, to sing a
Te Deum.
But it was not the place for either; so carefully, as though it were a sacred ceremony, she took off her hat and pinned it in the large brown paper bag thoughtfully provided by the Railway. She was saved. At Ghinni Junction the nightmare would end.

The old sleeping woman had awakened, and secretively fumbled her teeth back into her head. She was like a little toad, speckled with liver-spots, yellow and cream with fatigue.

‘Soon be there,' she said vaguely to Cushie.

The morning landscape looked half-painted. It had been a droughty year. The pastures were greenish-blond, like worn plush, but around the permanent way, elevated above the long swamps, coarse grass shone translucent and livid in the heightening sun. The drainage project, abandoned because of lack of public funds during the War, had left islets of white sand where navy-blue, tail-less waterhens dabbled amongst the pigface and river hyacinth. Pink dirt roads keeled down to disused sidings; derelict wooden farmhouses, toppling barns, stood amongst ashen trees.

Everything had failed since the gold ran out, everything except the canned fruit and jam factories at Ghinni Junction.

The little toad had got up. ‘Going to freshen up,' she explained to Cushie. ‘More'n two hours to Ghinni, but we can have a cup of tea and a bite there.'

Cushie slid the door aside for her and she hobbled into the corridor. With the old woman gone, the mysteriously compact world of the train closed about Cushie.

Saved! Saved! Somehow Mrs MacNunn had guessed, that warm, motherly woman, and had told Jackie something was wrong. Cushie wanted to laugh, shout. She knew very well that if she let herself go even for a moment she would begin to cry with relief, so she concentrated on the world beyond the windows, where the mountains of Paddy's Range ran in towards the line, grey as spiders, and swooped away again, dark blue.

The express stopped nowhere, ripping through dog-box stations with a deafening snarl. She caught glimpses of paintless, veranda-ed shops, market gardens, streets that began in desolation and ended five hundred yards farther in a dusty paddock. These villages were all old goldmining towns, built on the banks of gravelly creeks called Breakfast, Shadowgraph, Jump-up. Sparsely vegetated mullock dumps were everywhere.

Suddenly Cushie was starving. She felt electric, scarcely able to sit still in her seat. When the old toad came back she shared her sandwiches with her.

‘Over our homesickness, eh?' said the old woman. ‘Don't take the young ones long.'

She said she had come from the Queensland border to visit her daughter south of Sydney, who had a lump in her breast—God knows what, they had to hope for the best; but there were the four children to be looked to, and a husband who had to be fed and got off to his work regular.

So passed the two hours. As the train pulled into the busy junction, Cushie scanned the crowds that drew together, scattered, rushed in and out of the train. She saw Jackie nowhere. But knowing what to do, she left her luggage where it was and hurried to the telegraph office to see if a message had been left for her. There was nothing.

She stood at the office door, her heart beating painfully. Dazedly she sought Jackie's face in the crowds.

Nothing amongst the dreadful happenings that had gone before was worse than this moment. She felt that she had got off a ship in the wrong country. She rushed in again, besought the telegraph clerk, ‘Are you sure, are you
sure
? The name might have been spelled wrong, Foy, or Hoy. Please, please, look again.'

Nothing. Whistles were blowing, porters shouting, people scampered on board the express with slopping cups of tea and thick slices of bright-yellow madeira cake. The telegraph clerk, touched by the girl's distress, said kindly, ‘Better get aboard, miss. Ten to one your wire's been sent on to Sydney. Cheer up! That's where it'll be.'

She scrambled aboard the train, to find the four empty seats filled.

‘Thought you'd fallen in, dear,' said the little toad, cheery with tea.

Cushie threw up the window, leaning out as the train gathered momentum. She saw running down the platform a grotesque little figure, its face darkened, disfigured in some way, waving its short arms, pursued by two tall men, one of them laughing.

She screamed, ‘Jackie! Jackie!' He struggled against restraining arms, seemed to see her frantically waving hands.

‘Here, little lady, want to fall out? That's enough of that!' One of the newcomers to the compartment pulled her back onto the seat and, with an authoritative air, slammed down the window.

She turned her face into the faded velour of the seat. She knew they were all looking at her, so she pretended to be asleep.

She had missed him—but he had tried to see her. Her disappointment was terrible, but it was not irreparable. He loved her, he cared about her. A kind of numb peace filled her. After a while the flitting patterns of sunlight across her eyelids ceased, and she slept deeply.

For half an hour they had been running into Sydney. Clicking gently over the points, slowing down after its long urgency, the train slid through Victorian suburbs of soiled brick, carrot-red roofs; drear or handsome terraces painted ochre or greasy white; Town Halls and schools stiff and spiked as crabs.

‘Better rinse your face, dear,' advised the little toad. ‘It's all over smuts.'

In the juddering washroom Cushie washed her face, tried to comb the soot out of her hair, put on her new hat and pinned it. She felt unreal, with fatigue after the night's journey, already tormented with dread of what unknown Aunt Claudie might say to her, thus fleeing in guilty disgrace to the city. But she still knew a rising hope that waiting for her at Central would be a telegram from Jackie. He had seen her at Ghinni; she was almost certain of it. Jackie would know what to do.

Almost lightheartedly, she reeled back to her seat, and greeted with anticipation the grey waste of platform, the dark vaults of roof that, when the hoarse breathing of the train ceased, echoed with clangs, bursts of steam, and rolling thunders.

Away she went behind a porter, not noticing the shabby man who met the little toad, or the old woman's painful, scanty tears.

At the inquiry counter there was no telegram for Miss Moy, no message of any sort. She stood there dumbfounded.

‘Miss, do you want to check your luggage? Miss?'

She gave the man two shillings to take it to the right place. He pointed out the clean, pleasant room of the Travellers' Aid Society. Cushie stood for a while in the huge arched cavern of the station, staring blankly at the lurid advertisements, the bitumen floor patterned with submerged cigarette ends. She was aware of a huge smell of burned cabbage from the tea-rooms, a cleaner in a semi-uniform languidly pushing a broom around her feet, his dustpan a cut-down kerosene tin on a long handle.

At last she moved to the Travellers' Aid waiting-room, answering the attendant's questions, refusing a cup of tea, sitting down at last beside women with babies, opposite a young girl who stared around with scared eyes and picked her nose in between times.

Why hadn't Jackie wired? Because those men had prevented him. But who were they? Not policemen. So her thoughts scurried round and round while this stranger and that came to collect the other people. A sombre man with a black band on his coat-sleeve met the nose-picker, and pushed her out the door with inexplicable vehemence. Sick with agitation, Cushie tried to concentrate on these comings and goings, until at last there entered a strongly-built short woman about the age of thirty-five. She looked around the waiting-room, and came straight over to Cushie.

‘Miss Dorothy Moy?'

Cushie nodded. The woman thrust out a capable hand and shook Cushie's.

‘You're—you're Auntie Claudie?'

‘Not me.' The woman smiled. ‘This is too early for Claudie. I'm Iris Pauley, her partner. You can call me Auntie Iris or plain Iris or whatever you like. Buck up, Dorothy! Nothing's as bad as it looks at seven in the morning.'

Iris had a direct, pleasant smile. She had thick bobbed black hair, very light eyes, and a pale skin freckled lightly like a bird's egg. She led the way to the left luggage, got a porter scurrying with a handcart.

‘I must go back to the inquiry desk first,' said Cushie desperately. ‘I've been expecting a telegram.'

There was no telegram. Iris eyed the girl with half-cynical, half-sympathetic understanding.

‘Come on,' she said and, as though Cushie were half asleep, led her out of the reverberant confusion of the crowded station. Fleetingly she patted the girl's hand.

‘I know this must seem ghastly to you, but it will be over soon.'

Cushie looked uncomprehendingly at this kind, meaningless stranger. A lump blocked her throat.

‘No,' said Iris firmly. ‘Don't start crying yet. When we get home you can bawl all day if you want to, and Claudie and I will bawl with you. But not now. You'll frighten the tin lizzie.'

Cushie was hustled into a car with a tiny engine and tall square body. They were off through the city, which was as noisy as if it had been awake for hours. It smelled sweet, stale, and different. Near the railway a huge circus tent stood on a vacant allotment, and there was a whiff of lions and mouldy straw.

‘Not far now,' said Iris. ‘We live at the top end of Elizabeth Street. Strawberry Hills, it's called. No strawberries and few hills. But it's convenient, and the salon is just across the road.'

The street was narrow and hilly, but there seemed to be an astonishing number of lorries and big horse-drawn wagons in it. Shabby factories, their chimneys smoking, were mixed up with cosy, sluttish little shops, and small cottages and terrace houses. The taxi pulled up outside one of these, painted a nasty hay colour, with a frangipani in a front garden nine feet by three. Its door was so blistered and repainted that it looked like a slab of melting toffee.

‘I'll bet it seems foul to a country kid,' said Iris; ‘but, never mind, it's a roof.' She hammered on the front door with the flat of her hand shouting, ‘Claudie! It's us! Open up.'

The door flew open and Cushie saw her Auntie Claudie for the first time, posing there in a blue kimino.

‘Poor, poor little Dorothy!' she cried. ‘Welcome!'

‘Oh, cut that out, you lunatic,' said Iris, pushing past her, ‘and let me get the kid's luggage inside.'

Cushie found a silky head under her chin, a small compact body in her arms.

‘Poor little thing!' said Auntie Claudie. She had a sweet, plaintive voice. She gave Cushie a small shake of what was apparently sympathy. ‘Poor deceived little girl!'

‘Oh, quit it, will you, Claudie!' said Iris, banging down the stairs and shoving past for another fistful of luggage. ‘And if you've cooked breakfast, give it to us. I'm as empty as a boot.'

Cushie had always thought of her Auntie Claudie List as a huge flaxen doll, handsome but vulgar, run to beef. This was the way Claudie had come through in Mrs Moy's rare references to her. But she was a very feminine woman, with a bulging baby forehead and a long frail throat with a bump in it. Her fair hair was parted in the middle and held by a broad black velvet band that disappeared at each side under coiled earphones. She had large grey eyes with a glassy shine. Cushie recognised with a tiny thrill of disapproval that not only were her aunt's eyelashes darkened; but her thin smiling mouth was brightened with lipsalve.

A photograph of the blonde giantess, the very Claudie of Cushie's imagination, was on the chiffonier in a seashell frame. Cushie's eyes fixed on this, couldn't move away, for the pretty plump lady was clothed only in a swathe of gauze from which her bottom protruded. The model looked backwards over her shoulder, a finger to her delicious chin as though to say, ‘Gracious, there's my what'sname, how did
that
get there?'

‘That's your Auntie Virgie,' said Claudie. ‘Isn't she adorable?' She picked up the photograph and kissed it. ‘Only eighteen she was there. What an art model she made! Oh, my darling big sister!'

She cradled the picture to her bosom. ‘I suppose Bede—Daddy—never speaks of her?'

Cushie shook her head, and Claudie put on a tragic face.

‘For God's sake, Claudie!' expostulated Iris. ‘You know you can't stand a bar of her. Stop bunging it on, will you? We want food. What about it?'