The Following (18 page)

They would somehow hope, too, that Powys would have news for them: that Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay had been removed as directors, and that Powys himself, in a fabulousness of riches, had bought the Inverarity Pastoral Company lock, stock and barrel, including sorting out legal contradictions that stuck in the throat of hope like fish bones in the middens of the Swampland Block. There was something of a hint of this in Powys’s letter to Elisabeth. That there might be changes, not all of them bad, but don’t tell Kyle. And of course Elisabeth said nothing to Kyle, but he read her face for signs.

Between Sunday and Monday, now, lay a conceivable day of judgement. A meeting of the Board. An undreamt-of resolution. A send-off in which Rosemary and Brian would be accompanied to the main road south and waved goodbye? For Elisabeth, merely, release – something as basic as a cottage on a few gardenable acres with mains electricity and reticulated town water so she would never again have to use washing-up slops on her roses.

Kyle lifted himself from his chair and went for his fourth emu, crossing the room in a semi-crouch, cramped but energised.

While Kyle and Elisabeth had no children, they certainly had their visitors, those evenings when they drank, ate, danced and played charades. At a certain moment everyone would be asked to step out into the Arcade and bring their drinks. Kyle would appear round the corner, doubled over, with a jumper pushed up his back to make a hump, reciting, ‘I that am not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass’ – the opening speech of
Richard III
.

Pushed, he would then recite something that wasn’t in Bounder’s
Collected
, yet so well spittled-out in honour of Bounder’s wildest articulation that you might almost convince yourself that Shakespeare and Bounder had ridden down some dusty road swapping wordplay and seen a wombat mating with an echidna, with a play on the verbs ‘prick’ and ‘jump’.

Bounder would be conjured unbuckling his belt, loosening his braces, telling blue jokes with aural illustrations in his high, shrill, cockatoo-larynx inflection. Then it would become clear that Kyle was darkly drunk and moving into a vengeful dimension.

The secret of Bounder’s bantam energy was that he’d been strapped into a corset every day of his life, and although his back wasn’t humped, it might as well have been because of the venomous energy he drew from the restriction as a barrier to pain.

Cut, Spud and Smelly would have a chance then to know the sort of bloke Kyle was in the heart of himself, in the ways that he showed himself as always a touch apart. They would give a shiver of self-congratulation that one of their band of brothers was grown past control. ‘If he’d had sons,’ they liked saying, ‘they would have been bigger galoots than he is.’

Then Kyle would throw a switch and run the projector in reverse. Dead these thirty years Bounder would back away from the lens ghoul-faced, inky-eyed in noisy-sprocketed black and white, jerked away behind doors that he’d close in his own face, jump in cars and be flung into trees, shadowing away to nothing, eclipsed by fades to black, after which everyone would take their drinks and return to the Arcade for a well-earned snort. There Kyle would become his best self again.

The Arcade was the reason the house was known outside district circles, written about by Warner Tarbett II in
Roughly Refined: Bush Timber Buildings of New South Wales
(1969).

Chapter Seven: A Living Wonder, The Inverarity Arcade.

The Arcade. It was that almost quarter-acre addition out the back of the original boxed bedrooms – the vast, semi-open, hip-roofed space with roof-to-floor flyscreens and a packed earth floor with a worn track made by feet navigating their way across from the bedroom wing to the kitchen wing.

Kyle had built the Arcade extending out from the original weatherboard homestead with his primal band of jackaroos, including young Powys, taking to the road like gypsies. The six of them trucked termite-resistant posts and beams up from the Pilliga Scrub, camping out by the sawpits and roasting a feral pig caught by the legs and brained with a screwdriver.

At intervals across the earth-floored width of the Arcade was furniture, as in the ruins of a temple, only seemingly randomly strewn – billiard table, table tennis table, rough-sawn benches, squatters’ chairs with plank leg rests and deeply curved canvas seats evoking a property owner’s right to exhaustion, sinking a few stiff ones after a long day in the saddle.

On cool mornings when mist skeined the homestead flats, there was a weather phenomenon duplicated inside the Arcade itself, a fog down at ankle-level among the chair and table legs. It was best then and at night when the generator was switched off, when the dusty light bulbs faded, glowing fitfully with each dying diesel cough. Then the silence was resounding. Joeys came in through the garden, hauled themselves up onto the verandah and rustled their noses on the flywire, trying to get in.

When Inverarity was sold to the Pastoral Company and Kyle kept on, no amount had been valued for homestead improvements, including the Arcade. It was Elisabeth’s hope that if a sale came upon them there would be money allowed for the Arcade, for the house, money enough when they had little to finance retirement. Too much before was made of the Swampland Block being unavailable, blocked from use by Kyle’s stubborn love of nature, fenced around but not within, barred to cattle and sheep since Kyle ran the place during the war with an old stockman and a Chinese gardener, how it devalued the total. Nothing was said about its being registered in two titles, only one of them conceivably legal. Possession was nine points of the law. The only benefit for Kyle, defeated by the bank, the seasons and something in himself, a thwarted calling to be someone his father never dreamed of, was to be allowed to go on living on Inverarity by grace and favour. The bank kept the rest.

That Inverarity had been made Kyle’s all over again by grace and favour of a pastoral company gave Kyle’s dramatic games a dread amusement. A Shakespearean king was never safe, he was never the one and only . . .

Rosemary MacKinlay liked pointing out – except to their faces – that Kyle and Elisabeth had started married life as ‘kept’ by Bounder and existed these years later on a continuation of the ‘keep’ principle in Bounder’s name. How much more they should expect was doubtful. ‘You have to be cruel to be kind.’

Old boys and their wives talked about it on the way home from Inverarity, how Rosemary patronised Kyle.
They
never agreed outright that Kyle was a stick man, a puppet.
They
never said that his whole life had been a diminishment down from golden boy. That would be too spiteful. ‘We all have to make our comedowns in life’ was as far as they went. They themselves had survived by making do. Their parties were not so lavish as Inverarity’s, and, ‘What a shame it was taken from them.’

It was fairly certain, they added, that the overseer reported to Rosemary MacKinlay regarding how the place was run. On sales days Fridays, Devlin could be seen at the post office, jammed into a coin box punching buttons A and B and giving out lambing ratios in his low, angry voice. Devlin was a friendless sort of a bloke, outside of the town’s disgruntables with whom he socialised in the bottom pub. Who else could he possibly be calling? A lot of thought went into the question. It was not considered that he had a woman right under their noses, a fiancée who wasn’t sure she wanted him and for whom he made plans involving stock economics on what was preposterously but conceivably legally her land in order to persuade her to come to her senses, and couldn’t he see what was needed was, not arguments, but garlands thrown at her feet wherever she ran?

Ross Devlin was the only staffer off any station anyone had ever heard of who sided with shearers and railway workers and voted red-ragger. In case nobody noticed, the local party branch consisted of a council grader driver, a school teacher, an orchardist and a poultry farmer. Hardly the cream of society. The MacKinlays were not pinko inclined of course, but their connection to Marcus Friendly, back when the Friendly House was built, meant they were interviewed by the papers from time to time, giving Rosemary the opportunity to puff with pride and deliver a put-down, all in the one breath.

‘Our dear old defeated
bloke
,’ she said.

On Sunday nights following ping-pong in the Arcade, after Ross and Kyle finalised the week’s work, deciding which paddocks were to be mustered, where tractoring and grading was wanted, and deciding which horses were to be shod or spelled – Kyle affectionately going through them by name, Ding Dong, Slammer, Masterful, Pegasus – cocoa was served by Elisabeth and the job assignments were given out. This week Kyle went through the ritual with fierce reticence. The jackaroos retreated to their quarters across the claypan, ready for a dawn start. Signed in pokerwork on the jackaroos’ mess room table were all the names of them since Kyle first came there, as owner and then manager.

Nothing equalled the bucking horses and charging boars coming out of the words
Thirteen Years at Inverarity
in Gothic script pokerworked by Ross Devlin. As gidgee logs glowed in the grate Ross moved back and forth with busy inspiration, carrying sparkling, red-hot engraving spikes to the table. Other names amounted to a ladder of the years – Powys Wignall’s being an early name, the words
Vale Salve
evoking his lofty touch and promise of return when he left Inverarity for Cambridge on the eve of World War Two.

*

S
OFT LIGHT CAME IN THROUGH
the high southern windows of Powys Wignall’s Macleay Street flat. It was comfortable there. The dressing room was bigger than most people’s bedrooms. The flat had five bedrooms. It had belonged to Powys and Rosemary’s parents, Floss and Billyum. It was Bounder who gave his cousin the name Billyum, and it stuck like false whiskers. In the will, Powys inherited the flat and the better share of the estate, or rather, made it so.

Powys, divorced, led a bachelor’s life amid the relics of his parents’ taste: heavy sideboards, a glass-fronted traymobile, an art nouveau clock. He did not like living alone. His mental energy was prodigious. Something that bored him had made him well-off. Money. He worked on his investments from a roll-topped desk. At eleven he went to Café Piccolino for coffee and a game of chess with one of the incessantly smoking, argumentative, foreign-accented habitués there – mostly with a Pole called ‘the Count’ – then came back to the flat to work on what mostly mattered to his heart and brain. Words. There was a satisfying accounting involved in a tally of words. He put a hundred in and took two hundred out. If he could get through without putting in a full stop he reached a thousand.

What Lamb, What Ladybird
was about the end of a marriage between an Englishwoman and an Australian officer. Too many false starts in the writing led to emotional exhaustion. Powys wondered if he – writing apart – would ever properly get going again. The story itself was the anatomy of a false start. The Blitz, the blackout, searchlights, the clinging kiss, the foolish promises, the embarkation leave registry office wedding, bombers overhead, fires combusting in the tracery of a – he wrote ‘an’ – hysterical woman’s wartime cork-heeled shoes in the dangerous dark. Never had there been such thrilling anxiety arching over each day’s ration of hours.

In years of strife, in times that were

Unthinkable to live in,

Upon a wave of destiny

To him she had been driven . . .

The lines fitted the mood. The émigré Polish count, habitué of the Piccolino, translated them from the Russian.

Powys abandoned the manuscript each day around five, then started again each morning after eleven, more or less like a metronome or an endless belt or a nerve or a tic or convulsion. Almost dead in those line-by-line struggles he was contrarily most alive.

Unlike the journalist Margaret Poole, who was trained on the
Auckland Star
never to blot out a line, Powys wrote with many crossings-out and replacements of words with other words demanding attention until he came back to his original choice and started over again. Attacking his Remington until screws shook loose, the machine almost leapt from the table on its stumpy rivets.

After Michaelmas term at Cambridge, 1940, the former Inverarity jackaroo Powys Wignall had joined the British Army, 7th Armoured Brigade, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the youngest ever promoted. His publisher-to-be was his brigadier, now a Labour-leaning lord, Adam Sylvester. Powys and Adam had fought the Jerries in North Africa (Operation Crusader) and the Japs in Burma (Battle of Yenangyaung). As a leadership example Adam Sylvester shone. ‘A wild cat in action, a gentleman out of it,’ the regimental history recorded. To create him on the page, within a fictional framework where documentary realism was inadequate, Powys remembered Kyle leading his jackaroos through the lignum swamps and prickly bush of Inverarity with little more than an affable tone of voice and an eye for a stockhorse and oddities of nature. In Burma, as practised by the character based on Kyle, it was eyes open for rabid dogs, and up to the neck in mud and tropical ulcers, and never betraying a worry or a concern beyond the job in hand. Everything was understatement. ‘Windy’ meant scared and ‘mad’ meant brave, and the battalion chaplain carried a .38 pistol on his belt.

Writing fiction met Powys’s definition of a split personality, a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships. He wrote, spending other people’s destinies like coins holding pocket heat. Out of it came an idea of how little he mattered and yet how desperately important his effort was. Writing had the power of prophecy.

One day Powys was finished, and off the manuscript went to the UK on airmail rice paper. Kyle Morrison stared out at the reader beyond his life in the Australian bush in more places than one, made over as Whitland, the Catholic chaplain bestowing extreme unction on a wounded Tommy; as Brody of the Mechanical Engineers, dismantling the engine of a disabled ‘Honey’ tank. Here was Kyle given rank and presence, raised above the average, multiplied, turned inward-looking, made puzzled, a searcher and left with a look of being emptied out, of having nothing to equal his imagined ideals except a hanging on to life and wondering what bloody next. When Brody raised his head above the parapet the better to see a flowering Tectona grandis out of great curiosity at nature’s gifts – such small white flowers hanging from a cathedral buttress – a sniper’s bullet rang out, and that was the end of Brody.