Swords and Crowns and Rings (7 page)

Cushie realised that the compassionate stranger had vanished.

‘You'll forget what I look like,' whispered Cushie, defeated. ‘You'll love Olwyn better than me.'

Mrs Moy looked at her freezingly. ‘Your vulgar jealousy of your sister only proves how much you need the discipline of Mount Rosa,' she said.

So Cushie vanished from Kingsland. Jackie never forgot her. Every holiday he looked for her. Sometimes she returned home, other times Mrs Moy and Olwyn went off by train and spent the holidays with Cushie in some distant city.

On the day the Piper was due to leave the lock-up, the Nun took time off from the shop and went down in the train to fetch him and bring him home.

‘You forget quick,' said his wife with rare bitterness.

‘True,' said the Nun.

He scarcely recognised John Nicolson. In a year he had become old and fat, softness all over, dissolving pork, the radish flush gone from a face now rubbery and grey. They went to a shoddy hotel for the night, and for a long time the Piper looked at himself in the glass.

‘Months since I laid eyes on my dial,' he said.

‘I got the pipes safely put away,' ventured the Nun. But his friend did not answer, staring at his reflection.

‘Would you like a drink, John?'

Troubled, Jerry said nothing while the older man drank himself into a stupor.

John Nicolson did not return to work. Living on a small Imperial Army pension, he went from one scrubby boarding-house to another, ending up amongst the Aborigines and tramps in the tumbledown shacks at the edge of town. But Jerry went to see him regularly, and sometimes Jackie accompanied him, for Jerry was under the impression that the boy had forgotten all about the day that the Piper knocked down the Gallipoli memorial.

But Jackie had not forgotten. An obscure pain touched him each time he saw old man Nicolson. It was neither fear nor hate, only recognition. The old man was a signpost, impersonal but important. He had indicated an unsuspected division of roads.

But, loving the Nun as he did, Jackie would have died rather than allow his stepfather to guess that he remembered anything at all about that rainy day long before.

Twice in the year they were ten Jackie found out that Cushie was home for the holidays, and lay in wait for her. The first time they both were petrified with shyness, not looking at each other, but seeing with some inner eye every tiny marvel of change.

Cushie was still plump and dimpled, though she was beginning to shoot up. She was already much taller than Jackie. Her golden hair was dressed in thick short plaits with curled ends, her skin sleek and blushing.

But she dropped her glance in the same old way, and he saw her mouth quiver.

‘Come and play,' said Jackie.

‘Mama won't let me,' she said. ‘I have to play with Olwyn.'

‘You ask her,' he pressed.

But he did not see her again. The second time they were not so much strangers, and spoke a little of unimportant things, the air electric between them. Each represented to the other an enigmatic compound of imagination, romance, otherworldliness. Jackie asked no questions about Mount Rosa, Cushie made no inquiries about their old school companions. They were content to be with each other and feel the air tense with unknown expectation.

‘I'll write you a letter,' he said.

‘No. They might read it.'

‘I'll put it in our secret hiding-place,' he said.

The secret hiding-place was an unused beehive amongst the shrubbery near Cushie's gate. Cushie thought about nothing else all day, filled with a thrilling alarm and delight. Her excitement was such that she forgot the demure expressions and attitudes learnt with such boredom and misery at Mount Rosa, and began sarcastically bickering with the bronchitic Olwyn, who hardly knew her at all and was querulously disinclined to know her better. The stamping tantrum and coughing fit that followed caused Cushie to be sent upstairs to her room.

But this time Cushie, though she was a girl of ungenteel appetite, did not mind going without dinner.

It was winter, and Mr Moy liked to dine early on such cold dark days. Cushie listened from the top of the stairs, waiting till he was well away on the table conversation. His smooth face would be engraved with a smile, but there would be no smile underneath, for he found almost everyone and everything unsettling. He treasured up each little slight and act of ill-will until he had a boxful of spiders, ready to jump out and bite him every time he opened the box.

Cushie did not know this. She attributed his constant complaints about the Bank, the War, the Government, the world, life itself, to an obscure burden he bore. It was called business worries and, according to the girls at Mount Rosa, was commonly suffered by fathers. She longed to help him, for she still loved him achingly.

Her attitude towards her mother had changed. The experience of being torn from her and hurled into Mount Rosa's abyss of homesickness and bullying had hardened the girl a little. The wound was still there somewhere, but it was covered with scar tissue. Her father had not sent her away: it was her mother who had her banished to boarding-school. A daughter of Bede Moy would never have been classified as a gentlewoman unless she were also a daughter of Belle Jackaman, of one of the oldest established and most respected families in the country.

Now Cushie crept down the stairs and out into the garden. It was a foggy evening, with blue spectral glimmers everywhere. Kingsland was still lit by gas, and its familiar smell, the very essence of home to Cushie, hung dankly about the trees. She groped gingerly in the ivy-covered beehive, hoping that Jackie had already visited it. A tight-folded wad of paper met her hand. She undid three buttons on her bodice and slipped it into the constricted front of her chemise. Though she was fevered to be back safely in her room, a hard-earned caution made her do up the buttons and tidy her hair before she crept back into the kitchen hall.

Olwyn was helping her mother carry the sweets course into the dining-room. Live-in servants were unheard of in Kingsland. Mrs Moy managed with a gardener, a handyman, and a daily woman who cooked the evening meal before she departed for her own home.

Olwyn's face, pinched and monkeyish, crinkled into a spiteful smile.

‘Cushie's supposed to be in her room and she's been outside!' she said.

‘I was just putting Tib outside,' said Cushie. She tossed her head at Olwyn. ‘She was in your room, not mine! I heard her mewing.' She escaped past the pair of them, hearing with some triumph her mother scolding Olwyn. ‘How many times have I told you not to let that cat into your room? You know the fur makes you cough.'

Cushie was not able to lock her bedroom door, so she hastened into the lavatory. There she unrolled the many careful pleats of Jackie's note.

‘I love you,' it read. ‘I really do.'

A wild unchildlike exultation filled her. Rapt and justified, she stayed in the arctic cubicle until Olwyn came whining to the door. Then she carefully tied the note in her handkerchief and pinned it inside her knickers, which was the only inviolable place she could think of. She felt that she had come out of a twilight that had been her world since she was born. She was loved, for the first time. She knew that her father did not love her, that inexplicably she disappointed him. Her mother loved her, she supposed, but only as a mother loved a child, not because she was uniquely herself. But now a person loved her for herself.

Pushing past the hopping Olwyn, she glided away to her room like a swan. She was always to remember this evening as one of purest joy. For a long time she sat at the open window, staring and melting into the shifting fog until her dress was sodden with damp, and she shuddered, aware of the asperity of the wind lifting the fog and ruffling the river noisily on the gravel bars.

Hurriedly she stripped off her clothes and got into bed. She wanted to stay awake the whole glad night, but in five minutes she was dead to the world.

The next morning she awoke ill, and spent the last few days of the holidays in bed with a congestive cold. Her mother looked after her assiduously, but could not refrain from reproaching her with bringing a cold into the house.

‘Daddy and I take so much care that we don't bring germs into the place, because of Olwyn's chest. But there you go, leaving the window flung wide on a foggy night, thoughtless as a bird!'

Cushie bore these reproaches humbly. Desperate lest Jackie took her non-appearance to mean that she had been shocked or amused at his letter, she waited on successive evenings at the window until she saw him in the shadows beside the fence. In the dusk he crept closer until he was below her window.

‘Were you angry?'

‘No. It was lovely.'

‘Why haven't you come outside?'

‘I'm in bed with a bad cold.'

Jackie slid away into the shadows. She did not see him again, but it did not matter.

The long War seemed to these children of Kingsland to have lasted for ever. Yet it had made little difference to them. Food was plentiful, the shops were full of goods, school and sports went on without a break, and if a young man's face was missed here and there in the crowd few people noticed. Families endeavoured to present a dignified front to the world; it was not good form to lament sons and brothers sacrificed for King and Country; they must smile bravely and be proud. Out of the young country's population of scarcely six millions, sixty thousand of her fittest and ablest young men were dead, and three times as many mutilated, blinded, disabled.

‘Bloody, bloody war!' grumbled the Nun.

‘You can talk,' said his wife. ‘You were ready enough to go in 1900.'

‘Yeah,' said the Nun, ‘seventeen years old and with a head full of soup.'

Privately he was ashamed that he'd ever taken rifle in hand against the brave and tricky Boers defending their homesteads.

‘A dirty scuffle that was,' he said. He shook out the newspaper, a pennyworth of sports, reports, auctions, advertisements for patent medicines and the local picture show, Tattersall's sweep results, steamship news.

Mrs MacNunn fanned herself. It was November and the temperature was eighty degrees. Her gauze combinations were sticking to her body, and the elbows that stuck out of her summer-sleeved striped fuji dress were moist and pink. She pegged up her damp hair on top of her head and said, ‘I'll get my hair bobbed, I swear I will.'

‘No, you won't,' grunted Jerry. ‘Smack your bum first. Shut up and look here.'

Mrs MacNunn looked at the headlines:
HUNS' LAST CHANCE
. Her eye wandered off to a nearby advertisement for a patent ointment, boldly spaced.

The Hun Looked For

THE DAY

Britain said: ‘You will Want

ZAM-BUK

The Day After.'

‘Wonder what will happen to them Huns,' she said, ‘when it's all over? I hope they mow 'em all down with a machine-gun.'

‘They're just people,' said Jerry. ‘Like you and me.'

‘Never!' said his wife. ‘Can't see you and me bayoneting helpless babies in Belgium. And all them other things.'

‘Matter of fact,' said the Nun. ‘You got German relations. My oldest sister Eva married a farmer name of Linz. Lives in the big valley up above Ghinni Junction.'

Mrs MacNunn gaped. ‘You oughta told me, Jerry!'

‘Go on,' said the Nun. ‘I mentioned Eva many a time.'

‘Not that she married a Hun. You ought to of told me. Beforehand, I mean. It never entered my mind that your sister might have married a foreigner. Now you've given our Jackie Hun cousins. He'd never live it down if it got out.'

‘Oh, shut up, you silly old tart,' said Jerry, losing patience. ‘The Linzes aren't proper Germans, anyway. They come from a place called Bohemia long ago. Drove out, they were, by bishops or someone who wouldn't let them have services in their own church. Far as I know, this farmer old Eva married is a decent hardworking joker, grows fruit, prosperous by now I wouldn't be surprised.'

‘You should of told me,' said Mrs MacNunn obstinately.

‘I didn't tell you hardly nothing,' commented Jerry. ‘Want me to start? Well, when I was fifteen, and I'd just come outa Borstal...'

‘You liar!' shrieked his wife, hammering him, and amid grunts and groans of laughter they rolled on the floor, collapsing in an amorous heap of kisses and tickles and squalls of: ‘I can't, I can't, I'm too hot, I'm boiling!'

‘You know what?' said Jackie, rushing in. ‘Cushie Moy's been sent home from school because they've all got mumps. What you doing down there on the floor?'

‘Exercises,' said the Nun, rising calmly. ‘Well, I'm going to see the cowboy picture. Who's coming?'

But it was too hot to enjoy the picture. Jerry went out at half-time and stayed out, smoking, looking at the stars, wondering about things, feeling the old pain in his leg like a red-hot coal. Yet he was content to bear it, feeling it a hostage to happiness, a small price to pay for his satisfying life. He thought of soldiers in distant countries, hoping that this should be the last night of the War, longing for home as he had longed for it on the veldt in that unreal experience of his youth.

‘Be a bit cooler tomorrow, with a bit of luck,' he agreed with the first of the patrons tramping out before ‘God Save the King'.

But November 11 was one of the hottest days in Kingsland's history, the town laid out helpless before the sun's fury. In the MacNunn kitchen the ice ran out of the ice-box. In the shop the cheese oozed drops of grease.

Jerry felt sick with pain. The shrapnel had moved, the doctor had told him, re-seating itself amidst muscle tissue and sinews. They'd have to have another shot soon at digging it out. Painfully, he lowered himself to the back step and got out his tobacco.

All the world was covered with fine dust, like peach fur. The vinous sunset was full of it. At eight in the evening the sun smouldered motionless behind bloody cloud-wrack that promised no coolness for the morrow.