A Kindness Cup (3 page)

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.

G
RACIE 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.

‘You know it is.' Jenner was observing her with interest. ‘What do you pretend for?'

‘I don't know,' she admitted. ‘I do sometimes. Everything here seems so narrow. So small. It extends the limits.' She grew muddled. ‘Truly, I don't know.' But she did in fact. She was claiming seclusion as well, an untouched-by-the-world virginality she thought might appeal. Jenner was too young to accuse fishers of men though he came close to it. His features were assuming the carved-out look of adolescence.

‘I'd like to go far,' she said. ‘A long way from here.' She kept smoothing the silk over her hips.

‘He didn't mean that sort of far, really,' young Jenner said. ‘You always take yourself.' He was recalling something from his last Latin lesson and the vision of Mr Dorahy with only adumbrations of despair viewing the hideous ochre landscape beyond the schoolroom windows.

Her
mother knew she had calved a winner. She was a pusher of whacking determination, prepared to ram citadels for those bell-like top A's.

‘Freddie Buckmaster is nothing,' she later warned. ‘Tim Jenner is nothing. There are other things for you.' She sweated through committees until someone arranged a fund.

‘I'll be leaving soon,' Gracie announced to the rivals who were resenting their collision on her courting veranda.

‘How soon is soon?' Freddie Buckmaster asked, being desperate to prove something to himself before she went. He scowled. It only accentuated his thickish brooding good looks.

Gracie said vaguely, ‘In a few months. January or February.'

‘That's too soon,' Buckmaster said. He had never heard her voice even at its most exquisite.

‘That's too soon,' said young Jenner, who heard only her voice.

Like the blacks, she could sing off disaster for him. His mother played the piano for her on those evenings when the Tilburns visited and Gracie, carelessly posed against one side of the unbelievable French grand that had been lugged battering miles from the south, decorated the long timber living-room with sound. It made a kind of truce between them, young Jenner and Buckmaster. Her throat affected them both.

‘I could swallow her whole,' young Buckmaster admitted. ‘Keerist!'

‘It's her voice I want to gulp,' Jenner said.

When he told her that he scored a sort of victory. She rode over to his home more often, a lazy-daisied hat flapping upon her shoulders. They wandered through grass-drench to creek banks where they would sit idly watching tiddler
stir or dragonflies hurtling across the surface. Rested her hand briefly in his.

Buckmaster sniffed them out sometimes, perched on his tall and spying chestnut. He had chucked school and had moved into the police where muscles and dad had won him preference. His horse could feel the irritation in his rider's flanks.

‘You'd better be moving back,' he would order, having no finesse. ‘We're on the track of the bunch that raided the mill. My boys are following a little way back.' His buckle shone. His belt shone. Some official silver buttons shone. ‘Tirra lirra by the creek,' young Jenner said, smiling.

‘Now what the hell does that mean?' Buckmaster asked.

He was ripe for revenge.

He crept on young Jenner one evening of long lilacs and bronze as Jenner came from the School of Arts with a bundle of books. There was no provocation, no time for specious gallantry, just the old bunch of fives smashing the nose bridge, the baffled mouth, cracking the ear till it screamed with the noise of deafness. Jenner, his visions torn, felt only bones commenting on flesh and, dropping the books in the dust, fought back with every part of him until Buckmaster, thudding his whole bull weight into his stomach, dropped him to the ground. Then he kicked him, once, with perfect timing and direction, so that his whole body wound itself up like a watch spring.

Mr Dorahy, coming down a back lane in his sulky, found Jenner vomiting by the side of the stock-and-station agent's storehouse.

‘You're entering the world of men,' he said. ‘Christ was wasting his time. It would take a score of Gethsemanes.'

He took him home and cleaned the muck from his face and later, seated on the little porch, they watched the flattened scrolls of landscape making proclamations until they
were absorbed in a distant haze over which the moon rode clean and indifferent. Jenner kept repressing gouts of sobs which were shame rather than pain.

‘Here's a man,' Dorahy stated, ‘who might restore your faith.'

A horse and buggy was clipping its way down the dirt road towards them, its driver a solid fellow and deliberate, a man from back country who had once worked a barren and hopeless holding that he had tried to milk with half a dozen windmills. On the testimony of willow-twigs, he had believed implicitly in the presence of a great artesian source and had sunk his shafts with the same faith as a miner. In his half-finished shack he had waited the arrival of his girl. Drays drew north and then coaches and she had failed to step from either into the dream. It had been ten years and his letters did not tap her source either.