Tourmaline (10 page)

‘There’s the truck,’ I reminded him. ‘We’re not self-sufficient.’

‘Why can’t we be?’ he demanded. ‘Get rid of the grog, and so on. A—a Utopia we could have, with the water.’

‘With the water,’ I echoed, glancing at his profile as he gazed out over Tourmaline. The nostrils of his fine straight nose were dilated, his mouth was tense. A sullen blue light smouldered in his eyes, under the fair lashes. I did not know what to think of him.

‘I could save this place,’ he said—so quietly and matter-of-factly that the queerness of this claim did not hit me for a moment. When it did, I began to fear him.

‘From what?’ I said. ‘Save it from what?’

But he turned away, with a sigh, swinging the rod in one hand, and picked off a flower from the bush, and held it to his nostrils. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, after a while; quite carelessly, as if I had tediously interrupted something. ‘Just thinking aloud.’

‘I can’t understand you,’ I said.

He gave a wry smile; not for my benefit.

‘You can save it with water. Is that what you meant?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’ And turning back from surveying the church he suggested that I might care to go home.

He came with me down the hill, and I invited him to inspect my gaol. The papers in the yard seemed to interest him. Digging about with his foot, he asked whether I might have such a thing as an old survey map of the area. But I could not remember anything of that kind, and he looked displeased. He seemed about to ask me how such masses of paper came to be in the yard; and I was glad when he stopped, as I could not have explained to a stranger, and one so young, the despair that had driven me to this gesture, after years and years of hopeless waiting. He would not, I judged, understand the anguish of old men.

Later I took him to the garden, which was then at its worst. Rock was not there. The diviner looked about him with a slightly contemptuous air, which I found it difficult to pardon, although he was evidently unconscious of it. We both refrained from any mention of water.

He returned with me to my house for a wretched meal which I prepared in a few minutes. The house seemed to intrigue him. He poked around for a time among my few books, pored over the wall map, and glanced repeatedly at the wireless, with an enigmatic smile. I did not know what to make of him. After a whole morning in his company I was beginning to find him in many ways oppressive; so very remote, at times not altogether human. And yet, at other times, especially when he laughed, I could see nothing in him but a charming and candid boy, to whom my soft old heart warmed in an instant. He was confusing. I could not fathom him.

When he had eaten, he said he would go up the hill again, to look at the empty huts, and took his leave of me. I stood at my back door and watched him. The lean blue figure slowly climbed the path, turned a bend and was gone. And above, on the hilltop, church and skeletal bell tower loomed flat and sharp, as if drawn with a fine pen on the sky.

Suddenly he too was there, a dark moving line. He paused for a moment to look down on Tourmaline. I saw his arm go up as he shaded his eyes. Then he merged into the church wall, and vanished.

That same day he told Tom and Mary that he would leave them in the morning to take up his quarters in one of the stone huts. Mary was unwilling to let him go; but he insisted, with that cool stubbornness of his, that they had done enough for him already. He did, however, accept a bed and some cooking gear, to be carried up to the hut later by Charlie Yandana and his brother, besides a little food which Mary forced on him.

‘You must come down and see us,’ she instructed him. ‘Often. Especially when those black dogs get on your back. We don’t want you to be lonely.’

‘The black dogs are gone,’ he said; promising, offhand, to come there now and again. Then he picked up his blanket and a billy or two, and went off past the gaol to his new home.

When Deborah saw him go, she began to think of things she might have done for him. ‘I’ll take him some dinner,’ she said, ‘already cooked.’

‘He’s not paralysed, is he?’ asked Kestrel. ‘I never saw you running round with tucker for Jack or Horse.’

‘Jack and Horse are always here,’ she said.

‘Ah, leave him alone, poor bastard. He won’t want women clucking round him when he’s just got away from Mary.’

She looked at him, frigidly, and went ahead with her intention. And in the afternoon she went trailing up the hill to his hut, a billy in her hand.

Those square flat-roofed humpies are deceptive. The room inside is larger than one would suppose, and higher too, for the floor, of bare earth, is sunken a foot or two below the surrounding level. There is a doorway (doorless) and a window-place (windowless) and a good deal of air and light flowing in through the innumerable crannies of the walls. At one end is a fireplace, rather neatly made, even handsome, in which the diviner had rigged up a tripod for his cooking. Two tins of water stood nearby, and there were dishes and things stacked on a packing case. The bed had also arrived. It was on this that the diviner was sitting, deep in some book of Tom’s he had brought with him.

He looked up sharply as the dark shape of her loomed in the doorway. The light, coloured by floor and walls, turned the skins of both of them very red, and made his eyes rather pale and startling. It was hot under the flat roof. His upper lip was gleaming.

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think——’ And he stood up, courteously; though she had the impression, not for the first time, that he was ill at ease and not pleased to see her.

‘I’ve brought you some food,’ she said, stepping down into the room. ‘Because it’s your first day here, and we don’t know what kind of a cook you are.’

He made an awkward gesture. ‘You shouldn’t do that. I’m used to looking after myself.’

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘it’s no trouble.’

Looking about him, in his confused way, he asked: ‘Should I light the fire?’

‘No, it’s still hot. I’ve been walking in the sun. This is a warm house you’ve picked.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, vaguely; and as an afterthought invited her to sit down.

She perched herself on the edge of the bed, which had nothing on it but a grey blanket with a broad blue stripe, and quietly watched him. He was definitely uneasy, swinging the billy in his lean hand. ‘I suppose,’ he said at last, ‘you’ve eaten already?’ She nodded. ‘Oh well, then——’ He pulled off the lid, and a cloud of steam rose.

‘You don’t mind if I watch you,’ she said, ‘do you? It’s hot walking.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, don’t go yet,’ pouring out the stew, of salted goat meat, into a plate, and reaching for a spoon. He mumbled disjointedly as he ate, still standing. ‘This is very good. Sorry about the heat. Don’t know why everyone has to do so much for me.’

‘You’re a stranger,’ she said. ‘And a diviner as well.’ And all the time the unmannerly girl stared at him.

He caught her at it, and looked quickly down. ‘You don’t get many strangers, I reckon.’

‘Not a one,’ said Deborah. ‘You know that.’

‘Sure, I do,’ he admitted. ‘I’m just talking.’

Then out of the blue, while he was lifting a spoonful to his mouth, she said to him: ‘You aren’t happy, are you?’

The spoon hung suspended, and he looked at her. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘I can tell. Do you want to go away again?’

‘My oath, I don’t.’

‘Sometimes I’d like to go,’ she said, avoiding his eyes now, and craning her neck a little to look out of the window. ‘Just for a while.’

‘You’d never come back.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

‘You’ve talked about it, have you? To your husband?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t tell Kes that. He’s not easy to talk to.’

His eyes kept returning. She wore one of her several blue dresses, which the small sharp breasts strained against, and her thick hair was loosely tied behind. She was very slender and long-waisted. Her eyes were deep, and with a certain sombreness, even when she smiled, showing between the full lips her perfect teeth, like chips of quartz. She was rather fine. Only her legs were imperfect, a little too lean; and her feet, from having gone barefoot all her life, were on the broad side.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, putting down his plate.

‘Eighteen,’ she said.

‘As young as that——’

‘I’m old,’ she said. ‘I feel it. I don’t know.’

‘And you reckoned
I
wasn’t happy.’

‘I’m happy enough,’ she said, swinging her long bare legs, ‘if that’s what you mean. Only——’

‘Only what?’ he asked, guardedly.

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. And then: ‘Have you ever,’ watching him, ‘been in love?’

His mouth went hard. He resented the atrocious liberty.

‘No,’ she said, ‘please. Don’t be wild with me. You’re young too. I want to know.’

‘Why?’ he asked, in a dampening tone.

‘Because——I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if—what it’s like.’

‘Maybe I don’t either.’

‘You must.’

He pushed some crockery aside and sat down on the packing case, with his arms folded around his blue knees and his eyes on the floor. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said after a time. He was not even courteous any longer.

‘I’m coloured,’ she said. ‘P’r’aps I expect too much for a coloured woman.’

‘Ah, bull,’ said the diviner.

‘People can think they love anything. Anything at all. Just whatever’s there.’

‘You could be right.’

‘They have to love. It doesn’t matter about being loved—not at first. Loving’s the main thing.’

He shifted on his packing case, still earnestly examining the ground between his boots. ‘Where does this get us?’

‘In the end?’

‘In the end.’

She laughed. She looked quite gay. ‘How would I know? I told you, I’m eighteen.’

He shook his head, slow and brooding.

‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, leaning forward. ‘It starts with loving anything, whatever’s there. And it finishes with wanting to be loved back. And you could be unlucky.’

‘I don’t reckon,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘you should tell these things all over Tourmaline.’

‘But I don’t. Only to you.’

‘The other day, at Tom’s place——’

‘Only to you,’ she repeated.

‘Oh hell,’ he protested, standing up, ‘I’m not—I’m not—I don’t get this at all.’

‘You’re wild with me,’ she gently accused him.

‘No, I’m not. I’m grateful. It was bloody good of you to bring me up that tucker. But for God’s sake——’

‘You swear too much,’ she said. And that stopped him in his tracks like barbed wire. He sat down again.

‘I don’t mean it,’ she said.

‘Didn’t mean what?’

‘Anything. I was trying to joke with you.’

‘Ah, well,’ he said, with a cornered look, ‘sorry if I sound dumb.’

‘You’re nice to talk to.’

‘Nice of you to say it,’ he replied, rather sullen in his insincerity.

‘I’ll take the billy home now, if you’ve finished.’

‘Good,’ he said, rising to fetch it. ‘And thanks again.’

‘Can I come another time?’

‘It’s a hot walk,’ he hedged. ‘And I’ll see you in the pub, sometimes.’

‘It’s different. Kes doesn’t like you.’

He stopped in his movement. ‘Is that so?’ he said, after a moment. ‘He doesn’t show me that.’

‘He doesn’t show things.’

‘Why would he feel that way?’

‘He’s jealous,’ she said simply. ‘He’s not a diviner. And no one likes him much, except Byrnie.’

‘And you.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s different,’ she said again.

So he said no more, but held out the billy to her. And she slid her brown legs to the floor, and stood up, and reached for it.

‘Well, goodbye,’ he said.

‘Goodbye,’ said Deborah, graciously. And with those slender flanks stirring under the blue dress (a beautiful gait she had; he must have noticed, looking after her) she took herself out of the doorway and down the slope.

He lay down on the bed and stared up at the iron roof, at the rough crossbeams with the bark still on them. I am imagining, of course; I am imagining him as I so often saw him later when I went to the hut. But what he looked like when he was alone, and what he thought—these things I will not imagine. He was too confusing. I will not try to pin him down.

Deborah, meanwhile, went down the hill to the road, and down the road to the hotel, and quietly into the kitchen. But Kestrel heard her, and called out: ‘How was the witchdoctor?’

‘Ha ha ha,’ she sneered, as she bashed the billy. ‘Very funny, Reginald.’ For that was his unexpected name.

It was a rare month that brought Dave Speed to Tourmaline. That was why, when I saw him trudging up the road late one morning, apathetically followed by old Jimmy Bogada, I came quickly from my house and called after him.

He turned and walked back, pushing the greasy hat from his forehead. A peculiar lop-sided gait he had, like a drunken stockman.

‘Long time since you’ve been here,’ I said.

‘Had no reason,’ said Dave, in his furry meandering voice, as he put down the bag that was slung over his shoulder and wiped his forehead. ‘How’s things with you?’

I was fine, I said. And he?

‘Not so bad,’ said Dave. ‘Getting old, but.’

To me, I said, he seemed a young fella still.

‘Time flies,’ he said. ‘And who’d want to stop it if they could?’

He was the thinnest man I ever saw, not much more than a skeleton in his ragged clothes, and he did not look strong. For years he had seemed to be an alcoholic. Then, suddenly, in the space of a day or two, he was one no longer. But he never lost the mannerisms. Even now, one would have guessed from his slurred speech and rolling walk that he was half-seas-over. He was blind in one eye, too, and I may say in all charity that he looked a ruin. Yet something about him, in spite of everything, drew one’s attention, like a bird in the Tourmaline sky.

‘You’re going to see Jack,’ I supposed.

‘Might as well,’ he said, offhand. ‘Got some stuff for him.’ He was always in two minds about Jack, whom he had almost ignored when he was a boy. He had been heard to say that he reckoned the young one was a better man than his father; but he had said it with a trace of resentment in his pleasure.