Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (20 page)

She realised at once that he knew.

‘Heavens! You gave me a fright!' She felt herself beginning to blush under his scrutiny. How long, she wondered, had he been observing her? Quickly she turned back to the draining board. ‘Do you want an ice-cream or something? You didn't eat much for lunch.' She was guiltily conscious of making a special effort to please him. There was no reply, so she looked round. He had gone. She stared at the spot where he had been standing, ‘seeing' the look in his eyes. A tight little fear established itself in her stomach. Without raising her voice, she called, ‘Alistair?' But there was no reply.

She wasn't sure what to do. She felt shocked. It had not occurred to her—though as she thought about it now it seemed obvious and inevitable—that Alistair would need no real evidence but would simply know, just like that, would reach his conclusion based on the most fleeting and elusive of impressions. This was a legacy of their old bond, the sure and complete knowledge of each other. She washed her hands to get the smell of onion off them and dried them on a tea towel. Should she go and look for him? She already knew, however, that she could never talk to him about it. She had seen in his eyes that his knowledge was hard and cold—he would not, could not,
ever,
understand her point of view about it. She was certain of this. He would deny knowing it rather than attempt to understand. She experienced a deep anger and dismay as this became apparent to her.

She was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, nervously and unnecessarily wiping her hands on the tea towel, feeling a fiercely self-righteous enmity towards her son, when Rankin walked in on her. He was carrying his reading glasses and a pen in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other. He cleared a space among the vegetables and saucepans on the bench and put down the top sheet of paper. He tapped it twice with the rim of his glasses. Holding his glasses a few inches from his nose and peering at the paper, he said, ‘Here's you!' He put the next sheet of paper beside the first and said, ‘Here's Alistair.' He put the third sheet of paper beside that, and said. ‘And here's Janet.' He looked up at her expectantly.

Ida stared at him. There was a rapt expression on his face. ‘And where,' she asked guardedly, ‘are you?'

He looked slightly puzzled and snatched up the sheet of paper he had designated as hers. ‘There's everything you'll need. I've worked out one for each of you.' He offered her the paper. Suspecting something odd, she reluctantly took it from him and looked at it. It was a list of expenses of some kind. She could make very little of it.

‘What is it?' she asked carefully, handing it back. She realised he had been drinking.

‘It's the only thing that makes any sense,' he said. ‘You take the two of them to Yepoon on your own this year, or you go with your cousin or whatever you like.' He waved his glasses impatiently, handing to her the responsibility for such details and minor arrangements, indicating that it was only the grand scheme that concerned him. ‘I don't mind, you do what you like. And you see Janet settled in school before you come back.'

He paused and cocked his head sideways at the paper, his grey eyes bright with moisture and the glittering vision of his plans. ‘If there's anything I haven't thought of, so long as it's reasonable we can discuss it. Money's pretty tight again, that's all.' This wasn't true, but he habitually guarded against Ida or anyone else getting the idea that money was plentiful—it was part of keeping control of everything in his own hands.

Now he went on to explain in detail the basis on which he had spent his day calculating their individual expenses for the annual holiday, expatiating at great length on the absolute fair-mindedness of his arrangements for them. It was a plan, his manner implied, that no reasonable person could possibly object to. He was forgoing his own holiday in order to concentrate on essential maintenance to fences and yards before the autumn mustering. He and Robert, he offered—unintentionally suggesting an image of domestic cosiness—would manage their own cooking and whatever else was needed while she was away. He was, he admitted with a sort of half-reluctant wistfulness, almost looking forward to it. Though he was quick to add that it would mean a lot of hard work, and no break at all for him this year. Maybe, who could say, he and Robert might find the time to take a trip down to the Orange Field Days, or to some other event later in the year, to make up for it.

It was the physical contrast which struck her as most repulsive. He was wearing shorts and an unbuttoned khaki shirt. There were brown leather sandals on his feet. His movements were nervous and slightly exaggerated. He was largely unconscious of his appearance. With disgusted fascination she looked at the white, flaky skin of his heavily veined legs, noticing with a shudder how the slack muscles of his skinny thighs jiggled.

She turned away and picked up the vegetable knife. She recognised this mood. He had been shut away in that room sipping whiskey and revving himself up with ideas, rearranging the world to suit himself, and believing in it all—playing Almighty God. He wasn't going to listen to anything she had to say.

She sliced a large brown onion in half and ripped off the outer skins. They had persisted with the dreary chore of going to Yepoon at this time each year because there had never been anything else worth doing. The annual holiday had at least used up a few weeks of what would otherwise have been an intolerable period of idleness together during the season of storms and the worst of the heat. Neither of them had ever admitted to the other, however, that the fun had gone out of Yepoon. They had continued to insist that they all looked forward to it, that it was a great treat, a privilege less fortunate families could not afford.

And maybe, at the beginning, when Janet had been a baby, for a year or two, the annual trip to the coast really had been a pleasant change. Ida found it difficult, however, to recall such innocent family joy with any conviction. But because of the lie he would still expect her to show her gratitude. Nor did she believe for one minute that he seriously intended to do as he said. His plan, she was quite certain, was nothing more than an excuse to avoid his responsibilities so he could just stay at home sipping his whiskey and brooding while he kept Robert hard at work outside on his own as usual.

She ceased to listen to him while she did the vegetables. Her heart cried out to be alone with Robert. She imagined changing places with her husband, reversing his plan and sending
him
off to the coast with the kids. She and Robert would be alone together for three weeks! She abandoned herself to the delicious details of such days and nights where, in an untroubled progression of pure happiness, they would be actually
living
together!
Then a thought intruded before she had time to check it. It flashed across her mind, and was gone again as if it did not quite belong to her, but was an intruder, not her responsibility at all and had originated with someone else—possibly with Robert. The thought said:
if only we could get rid of Ward altogether
and be done with it!
It said it and was gone, leaving an image of herself and the stockman alone together in the sunlit landscape where they belonged.

She paused, the large vegetable knife half through the tough black rind of a huge ironbark pumpkin. The thought had not said anything so brutal as
kill him!
It said, rather,
if only we could have
it so that he had never existed!
It proposed an impossibility. But there
was
a way that might be pursued. She pressed down on the knife and sliced clean through to the board. The big black-green vegetable fell open, revealing its gaudy orange heart.

‘I'm not going to Yepoon this year,' she said, and held her breath, looking out the window at the oleanders, hearing the mad, cheerful chattering of the kitchen garden birds, appealing to them for acknowledgement of the justice of her case, waiting for
his
reaction.

‘Go to Cairns then,' he suggested offhandedly, and she heard him gather his papers together. ‘Or down to Brisbane if you want to.' He paused, ‘Go and stay with Gil!
There's
an idea! You could do that?'

‘I'm not going anywhere,' she said.

‘It doesn't
have
to be Yepoon after all, does it?' he went on, quite as if she had said nothing, but sounding extremely reasonable. ‘I daresay we're all a bit sick of the place. Go somewhere interesting. Go out to one of the islands. With me not having a holiday we could just about afford that. And it would give Janet something to talk about at school. Anyway,' he said airily, intending to leave, his business finished, ‘you decide.'

There had not been one important occasion during their life together over the past fourteen years when she had not given way in order to accommodate either his or the children's interests. She had always seen to it that his plans went ahead despite any clash of interests, not because she was inherently weak, but as a consequence of her original role on the Rankin place, before they were married, when his mother was still alive and dependent on people giving things up, while she herself was here just to help out for a while before going on to university in Brisbane—where she would begin her
real
life. There had never been any cause since then for her to make the huge effort that she knew would be needed to reclaim her freedom. Her solitary excursions into the bush had been her only demonstration to her family that she might be capable of wrenching herself away from them. But if these walks were a silent warning, it had gone totally unheeded. Neither Ward Rankin nor her children had ever noticed that she had given anything up. She had always been, as far as they could tell, just her normal self. They had known no other.

Between her lungs and her stomach Ida felt a painful muscular contraction: at that moment she was determined to take what rightfully belonged to her, no matter what the consequences. She felt the reasonableness of this determination as if it were a response to the ‘impossible' intruding thought that Rankin might somehow be got rid of. She would have no part of
that,
she was saying to herself, but she
would
do this. In this fashion her mind presented the case to her. It frightened her, for she could see no alternative, and she was not clear about the consequences—but she went ahead despite these misgivings.

‘I
have
decided,' she said, and the unsteadiness in her voice made him pause in the doorway and turn and look at her. He was a little less engrossed with himself and began to consider what she was saying. ‘I just told you, Ward. I'm not going anywhere this year.'

There was a moment of silence followed by the sound of his cigarette lighter flicking, and a deep indrawn breath. Then, in a tone of voice that was surprisingly even, he said, ‘One of us has to. Someone's got to see Janet settled. We can't send her off on her own to a strange school. I don't care how keen she is to get away from us.'

‘You do it then,' she said. Her heart was thumping and she felt herself tightening up inside to an almost unbearable degree. She was cautioning herself to stay calm, to just be strong and not get emotional; to be cold and hard and to out-face him.

But it wasn't working. Her feelings were barely contained on the edge of fierce expression and she feared that if he opposed her she would scream at him and lose control. She waited, gripping the huge half-pumpkin in one hand and the knife in the other, her back set squarely against him. His cigarette smoke wafted past her and out the window. She saw it drawn away by the draught, curling under the eaves.

‘Why
this
year?' he asked. ‘Any other year and it wouldn't matter one way or the other if neither of us went.'

‘You go,' she said tightly. And then she had an idea; she would take it a step further. ‘And put Alistair in school too,' she said. ‘There are a hundred good reasons for it. He'll hate it here without Janet, and anyway I can't teach him properly any more. He needs the company of other boys his own age.'

The rightness of her proposal suddenly seemed overwhelming to her. She turned round and faced him, still clutching the half-pumpkin and the knife as if she meant to demonstrate the proof of her argument with them. ‘I
know
we can afford it.' In her mind was an image in which all her problems were solved: the children gone, in school, home briefly now and then for holidays, and Ward shut up in his room, avoiding the work and the heat and being difficult only with himself—all he had ever seemed to want from life. ‘Don't tell me we can't afford it,' she warned him.

‘Why?' he asked sharply, puzzled, prepared to wait, but concerned too that something he did not quite understand was affecting Ida.

Her mind went blank when he asked the question. Completely blank. She just stood there staring at him. The answer was too obvious. His pale grey eyes, she noticed, were narrowed, suspicious of her, mistrusting and mean. There was something about his mouth that was weak, like a spoilt child's when it thinks it might not get its way at once—it wasn't exactly a pout, but was a drawing up of his lips to one side, an uncontrollable show of how miserably selfish his real motives were.

She felt disgusted by him. The nervous cramping of her diaphragm was beginning to produce nausea. She swallowed painfully, seeing in Ward's expression that his anger was building quickly towards a violent outburst. She felt pressured and panicky and said quickly, ‘I'm taking up walking again.' Her voice was distorted by the cramping pain and she realised her words must sound particularly odd. It was the only thing she could think to say that had anything to do with the subject, and it was, in part, the truth. And oddly she felt some relief at once for having said it. She saw, immediately, that it worried Ward rather more than she might have expected.

She replaced the pumpkin and the knife carefully on the board. And with her back to him once again she waited for his reaction. The silence went on for so long that she suddenly had the creepy feeling that he had either slipped up close behind her, was only inches from her back intending some unpleasant action, or that he had gone from the room altogether.