Chance Developments (12 page)

Three months later, when summer was beginning to tilt towards autumn, the Standard Tourer, driven by Roger Kelly and with Thomas Farrell sitting on the buttoned-leather rear seat, drove slowly past the teacher's house. A few minutes later, Thomas Farrell lowered himself from the car and walked, unaccompanied by his driver, to the front door.

Ronald answered the knock. He knew immediately who it was—even before he saw the car parked discreetly a short distance down the road. He stood in the doorway, momentarily unable to say anything.

“I take it that you're Ronald O'Carroll,” said Thomas.

“I am indeed, sir.”

“Then you will invite me in, if you don't mind.”

Ronald stepped to one side. “Of course.”

As he did so, he said to himself:
You are not to be intimidated by this man. You are the teacher. You are a graduate of the National University of Ireland. You are not some ignorant
…

They entered the living room. Thomas looked round it appraisingly. Then he turned to Ronald.

“They told me that your father was a very fine man,” he said.

Ronald had not expected this.

“Thank you,” he said. “He's retired now. He's living near Sligo.”

Thomas nodded. “So I hear.”

There was a silence.

“We have somebody working on the farm, you know, who was taught by him. A fellow by the name of Severin.”

Ronald raised an eyebrow. “Yes…”

Thomas interrupted him. “They're not a good family,” he said. “Some of them…Well, the least said about them the better. But this fellow—the fellow who works for me—is different. He says that your father got him to make something of his life. He's very grateful to him, you know.”

Ronald's relief showed.

“You're pleased to hear that?” said Thomas.

“It's a good thing to hear that of one's da,” said Ronald. “Who wouldn't be pleased?”

Thomas crossed to the mantelpiece, where there was a photograph of Ronald's parents. “He looks a lot like you,” he said.

Ronald shrugged. “So people say.”

Thomas turned to look at him directly. Ronald tried not to flinch at the intensity of the gaze.

“You've been seeing my daughter,” he said.

Ronald took a deep breath. “We've been seeing one another, yes.”

“Driving around in my car together,” said Thomas.

“She invited me,” said Ronald quietly.

Thomas suddenly took two steps forward, bringing himself right up against Ronald. He reached out to grip the lapels of the younger man's jacket. When he spoke, Ronald smelled something on his breath. It was not alcohol, but aniseed, he thought.

“She's hiding you from me, you know. She hasn't wanted me to know…” He broke off, releasing the lapels. “Kelly has told me. That's how I know. My own daughter won't speak about it.”

Ronald plucked up his courage. “Perhaps she thinks you won't approve…”

This was brushed aside, but not in a tone of anger. “She's all I have, Mr. O'Carroll. She's everything to me.”

Ronald did not reply. He was unsure what to say.

Thomas reached out to touch his sleeve. It was a curious gesture; one of supplication, it seemed. “So please don't take her away. Please don't take my whole life away from me.”

Ronald gasped. “I hadn't intended…”

“Please marry her,” said Thomas. “Please marry her and then come and live on the farm. Don't go off to Dublin like all the others. Everyone—going off to Dublin. We have two empty houses—fine buildings. I'd get one done up just for you.” He paused. “And I'd consider myself honoured to have a man of your quality marrying my only daughter. I would be proud. If you are anything like your father, that is—which I believe to be the case.”

Ronald sat down. “I hadn't thought…”

“You think she might not agree to marry you? But, my dear fellow, she's besotted with you. A father can tell.”

Suddenly the mood changed, and it seemed to Ronald that Thomas felt the matter was settled. He watched him as he moved to the bookshelf and reached for one of the books. “William Butler Yeats…I've heard that he's your man. He's just the thing this country needs.”

“You read him?” asked Ronald.

“Not exactly,” said Thomas. “Not as such. But then there are an awful lot of people who do.” He opened the book and flicked through the pages. “He has a way with words, this fellow. You can tell, can't you?”

Words. He thought of how he would have to work out what to say. He would ask her tomorrow.

And when he did, she said, “Yes, I would love to marry you, Ronald O'Carroll.”

She was smiling at him. “It's strange how two tacks could change our lives, isn't it?”

He looked steadfastly ahead. “Yes, it is.”

“Or were there more?” she asked, with a smile.

The man in the photograph, sitting on the deck of a boat with a young woman at his side, was called David, and he was an only child. His father, Lou Rowse, owned a small agricultural machinery business in Bendigo. Lou was a Cornishman who had gone out to Australia in 1907 to join a childless uncle who had offered him a job and a chance to escape the poverty of life in England. “It's the richest, most powerful country there is,” his Uncle Jack wrote to him, “and yet what do the likes of you have? England owns the world—look at the red on the map—and yet it can't give her people a proper breakfast. Why? Because the working man can't get a decent chance.”

The mention of breakfasts was an odd way of putting it, but the words had struck a chord in the mind of the young Cornishman. A decent breakfast. It was true: sometimes he got a piece of bacon or a sausage for his breakfast, but this did not happen every day; most days it was bread, with a thin spreading of lard—a
sniff of lard
, as his mother put it. This would be accompanied by a thin porridge and some milk, or curds of milk. And here was his Uncle Jack, a miner and prospector, talking about Australia and the lavish breakfasts they had there; not that he gave details, so it was left to him to imagine the plates of fried mushrooms, the abundant rashers of bacon, the generous slices of toast covered with real butter, yellow and creamy, on which thick-cut marmalade had been spread. That was a breakfast to set you up for the day, and that, in essence, was what his Uncle Jack was offering.

Uncle Jack had never found gold, but Lou was told that he would. “You find gold if you look hard enough,” said his father. “He'll find it all right, if I know Jack.”

He was sent the fare for his passage, along with six pounds. He used two of these pounds to buy a suit, and ten shillings to buy a large trunk and a pair of best boots. He was wearing these boots, the leather still stiff and shiny, when he arrived in Melbourne. His uncle met him at the docks. “You're a strapping boy,” he said admiringly. “Sixteen, now?”

“Sixteen, sir.”

“No, none of that. I'm your Uncle Jack, right? We don't go in for none of that out here. One man's as good as the next.” He put an arm about the boy's shoulder. “You're going to do fine out here. Look after yourself, you see—that's the ticket.”

They travelled to Bendigo by train, the line winding through a landscape that Lou found familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There were the things one would recognise anywhere—roads, houses, churches; there were hills and farms and sheep; but there was something that was unlike anything he had seen before—a sky so high and wide and empty that he felt dizzy just squinting up at it from the window of the railway carriage. There were trees that were quite different from the trees he was familiar with—the oaks and hawthorns of his boyhood.

Jack was proud of Bendigo. “You see all this,” he said, pointing to the street outside the railway station. “All built on gold.” He paused. “Wait till you see our town hall. And our trams too. Big fountains too—we've got a place called Pall Mall—anything they have in London, we have here. Anything.”

“Where's your mine?” asked Lou.

Jack sniffed. “Not my own mine, actually. There's one I lend a hand with. I never found anything myself, although I'm still looking, you know.”

They made their way to Jack's house. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “But it's got a roof and four walls. What more does a fellow need?”

The plot was a dusty half-acre. There had been attempts to grow shrubs of some sort, but these had been abandoned, leaving small areas of dejected wilderness. Along one side of the plot was a line of eucalyptus trees, casting a shadow that gave protection, in that direction at least, from the sun. That night Lou heard the wind moving the branches of the trees. It made a sound like the sea, he thought, and for a moment he was back on that long sea journey that took him from everything he had known to put him here, in this strange land, friendless and alone, apart from an uncle he had never met before.

Jack introduced Lou to a man who said he would give him a job.

“He sells rope,” Jack said. “Rope's the thing of the future, now that gold isn't doing too well. Rope's different. You don't have to dig for it, and they're going to need a lot of rope.”

He liked the smell of rope, and its texture too. This enthusiasm made him a good salesman: if you believe strongly enough in something, then you can persuade others to believe in it too. He was promoted and his salary, meagre at first, was almost doubled. Now he was able to afford to rent a room rather than to live in the lean-to extension to his uncle's house.

He was worried that his uncle might resent his departure, but that did not happen.

“No offence taken,” said Jack. “A man's got to stand on his own two feet.”

He found lodging closer to the centre of town, in the house of a gold prospector's widow. There he had the breakfasts he had dreamed about.

“This,” he said, pointing to his plate, “is the reason I came to Australia.”

“As good a reason as any,” she said.

Four years after Lou's arrival, Uncle Jack disappeared. He left a note on the kitchen table, and Lou found that when he went to look for him.

“I tried,” the note said, and not much else. There was no forwarding address nor any indication where he was going.

“People go walkabout,” said the widow. “And I hear he had debts. A lot of the prospectors do. The suppliers get paid if they find gold, but not if they don't.” She shrugged. “Business.”

“He could at least have said goodbye,” said Lou.

“Then his creditors would have been able to get at you,” said the widow. “This way, you don't know anything. What you don't know, you can't tell.”

He continued to work with rope until he met a man in the bar of the hotel who said that agricultural machinery was the business to be in. “Farmers need these things,” he said. “Tractors, ploughs, harvesters.” Each was given the weight of a word in a litany. “Carts. Winnowers. Wire cutters.”

Lou was convinced, and agreed to put what savings he had into a new venture. It was a success, although the partner—the man he had met in the bar—turned out to be a bigamist and left hurriedly for Adelaide. Lou now owned the entire business, which was growing rapidly. Jack had been right: people needed rope.

He met Dolly Lancaster, the receptionist in the Grand Hotel, at a party to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday, and married her six months later. David was born two years after that, just when they were beginning to wonder whether Dolly would have trouble conceiving.

He was a particularly precious child to them, as the doctor had warned her she could have no more. She watched him in his cradle at night, sitting silently beside him until she herself dropped off to sleep. Sometimes Lou found Dolly still there in the morning, having not moved from her vigil.

“Don't wrap him up in cotton wool,” he warned. “Boys learn by scraping their knees.”

She knew that he was right, but could not help herself. “When something is as precious as that, it's really hard to let go, Lou. It just is.”

He understood. “I have three precious things in my life,” he said to Dolly. “You, my boy, and the business. Three things.”

“You deserve it,” said Dolly. “The moment I saw you in the hotel—the very first time—I knew that you were a kind man. I knew that you were going to ask me to marry you.”

Lou laughed. “Get away!”

“No, I did—I swear it. I thought:
That's a good man and he's going to be my husband.
”

“I love you so much,” he said.

She took his hand, and kissed him.

Several times a day they exchanged kisses. David watched them, bemused by the ways of the adult world. He kissed the dog, a Sydney terrier called Bob. “We don't kiss dogs,” said Dolly. “Not in this family. It's unhygienic.”

“He likes it,” said David.

“That may be, but you don't want to get dog germs,” she said.

“Don't kiss the dog,” said Lou sternly. “You hear me? Don't kiss the dog.”

David was loyal, and saw in the dog a quality of loyalty that seemed missing in the human world. “Dogs are good,” he wrote in a school essay. “They don't drop you for other friends, they don't mind what you're like, a dog will never let you down.”

The teacher wrote in the margins of his exercise book: “This is a very good essay, David. You are right about dogs. They are very loyal creatures. Remember, though, that each sentence must end with a full stop—a comma will not do. A comma is just like taking a breath. And it's
their
not
there
when you're talking about what people possess.”

His strongest memory of childhood was of waiting for the beginning of the school holidays. That came achingly slowly, but when the day arrived the whole school was gripped with an electric excitement. The holidays themselves seemed endless, particularly in the first days—a blissful period during which he would spend hours with his friends at their favourite dam, fishing for the giant whiskered barbel that were rumoured to live there but that had never been seen, making camp fires on which they cooked roo steaks, riding their bicycles along the town's perimeter roads until heat and thirst drove them indoors.

He was aware that his father drank too much and that his drink problem was becoming steadily worse. He picked this up from his mother's look when his father returned from work each evening and immediately poured himself a whisky. He listened to their arguments: “Not too much, Lou. You know how strong that stuff is.”

“Doll, I've been drinking since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I know my limits.”

“Too much is bad for the liver.”

“My liver is used to it.”

“You know what Dr. Bamfield says. He said the fact that you're alive is something of a minor miracle.”

“The fact that
any
of us is alive is a minor miracle,” he retorted.

He worried for his father. On one occasion, when he was ten, he accompanied him to an agricultural show. On the journey home, his father drove back by an unusual route, stopping outside a house in an unfamiliar part of town. “Wait in the car,” he said. “I won't be long.”

He watched his father go inside. It was dusk, and a light was switched on in one of the front rooms. A blind was pulled down at the window.

He entertained himself by counting the stars as they appeared in the sky. Then, bored with this, he let himself out of the car and went to sit by a small pond that had been created in the garden of the house. There were tadpoles in the water.

He looked up. His father was emerging from the front door. He glanced briefly over his shoulder, and then leaned towards the woman who was showing him out. He heard the sound of voices—his father's voice, and then hers. He heard laughter.

He ran back to the car, shielded from view by a hedge of stunted willow. They had learned a song at school:
I shall hang my harp on the weeping willow tree, and never more will think of thee…

His father returned to the car. There was whisky on his breath; David could always tell.

“Good boy,” said his father. “Just doing some business.”

“Are they buying a tractor?” he asked.

His father glanced at him. “Maybe.”

He knew this was not true, and he was shocked that his father should lie to him.

“Don't tell your ma we stopped by here,” he said, as they drove off. “I don't want her to think I spend all my time working. Understand?”

He nodded.

His father gave him a peppermint. “Would you like two bob?” he asked.

He said he would; he thought it was a lot of money.

“Fair enough,” said his father. “I'll give you two shillings when we get back.”

David knew that something was being purchased, but he was not sure what it was.

Relations between his parents became increasingly tense. Kissing had stopped long ago, and now there were long periods of silence, punctuated with sighs from Lou. David watched, but could not find the words he felt he should say. He wanted them to be friends; he wanted them to stop the arguments he could not help but overhear after he went to bed and they thought he was safely asleep.

Then he heard the last of these exchanges. It was on a Sunday night, and his mother had been listening to a serial on the radio. His father had been out, but came back after David went to bed.

He heard him come in. He heard a bath being run.

“What do you want that for? You normally bathe in the morning. Why the bath now?”

His father's voice was slurred. “Cleanliness is next to godliness. Ever heard that, Dolly?”

“You've been with that woman. That's why.”

There was a brief silence. Then: “So?”

“Don't you care any more? Don't you care any more about your son?”

“Of course I care.” And then there was a new note of defiance. “I'm leaving. Tomorrow.”

“Going where? To her?”

“She has a place up in Queensland. I'm going there. Sorry, but I can't see any other way.”

“Then go. Just go. Go and drink yourself to death with this floozy of yours. Good riddance.” There was a pause, during which he could not make out what they said. Then she spoke again, her voice rising with emotion. “I can't stand any more of this—Davey and I will be better off without you. Just get out.”

The bathroom door slammed.

He lay quite still. He thought that he might go and plead with his father; surely if he begged him he would stay. But would his mother want that? He remembered what she had said: it would be better for everybody if he went.

In the morning, he woke up to find his father standing by his bed, wearing his coat and a pastoralist's hat. There was a lengthy and not very coherent explanation. “Your ma and I have been having our little differences, see, and sometimes when it's like that, it's best to go your separate ways.”

He closed his eyes, willing this not to be happening. It was what you did as a child: you willed away those things you did not want to be. Sometimes it worked; but not now.

“You understand that, don't you? It doesn't mean that I don't love you as much as I always have—I do, of course—but I'm going to go and live up in Queensland for a while and see how things work out up there. I've got that fellow, Hopkins, to run the business for me—that'll give you and your ma all the money you'll need. You won't want for anything.”

He lay immobile. How was it possible for a man to leave his own family? How could such a thing come about? How could his father understand so little about loyalty?

At last he spoke. “Can I see you?”

The question seemed to please his father. “Of course you can see me,” he replied. “You can come up north any time—in the school holidays. I'll have a cattle station up there, you know, Davey—I'm going with a friend, you see, and she's been left a half interest in one by her grandfather. That's great, isn't it? Half a station! Me!”

“I wish you'd stay,” he whispered.

“What's that you say?”

“Nothing.”

His father bent down to kiss him on the forehead. “Be good, son. Work hard at school. Show them what you can do.” There was a pause. “Look after your ma, too. Get that? Look after Ma.”

David started to sob, but his father neither saw nor heard this, as he had straightened up and was walking across the room. He turned at the door, raised a hand to wave, and then left. A few minutes later his mother came in and held him tightly to her as he sat up in bed. She dried the tears from his cheeks. She said, “We'll be all right, Davey. Just you and me—we'll be all right.”