The Big Fellow, page 25
“You don’t like it,” she said, watching his face. “It makes your hackles rise. You don’t think it’s at all the sort of figure for a women’s hospital.”
He evaded the question with a quick counter: “How much do you value my opinion, Neda?”
“Quite a lot in most things,” she told him.
“In matters like this,” he said, “it’s worth just about as much as that of an old dray-horse in blinkers, and I’ve got sense enough to know it.”
“Well, let’s leave it at that,” she said lightly. “I don’t usually ask such questions. Anyone who does deserves a dusty answer. Besides it’s not finished.”
She took him inside to where Rosa had laid out a meal on the bare table overlooking the sea. A look of subdued excitement shone on the half-caste woman’s face as she hovered about them, stealing glances at Donovan’s broad back, sniffing in the tobacco-smell of his clothes, noting the way his eyes played about Neda’s face. She had been moving about with happy animation ever since the strange car had driven up and he had stepped through the gap in the tea-tree hedge. There was no need for her to hear what had passed between the two of them: she knew in her blood when a man was moving in to take possession of his woman. It gave her almost the same physical thrill as when Joe’s father had appeared after a long spell away. For some time she had been disturbed about Neda: she did not like leaving her alone of an evening with a book. She did not believe any of her own sex could be content for long without a man.
Donovan hardly noticed her. He was explaining to Neda why he was at liberty for the time being, puzzled to find how little she knew of what had been happening in the political world. He might have been telling her of some strange island from which he had returned after living for a long spell among the natives. It was not that she showed a deliberate lack of interest; she kept her eyes on him with quiet concentration as she leaned on one elbow eating her fish with a fork, asked him shrewd questions from time to time, always seeming a little ahead of him when he laboured a point. But it was as if her feelings and imagination were not fully engaged. Occasionally her glance seemed to wander out of the window, over his shoulder, to where an end of Old Woman Island showed in a glitter of sea-haze.
What’s she thinking about, he wondered. That figure, is it?
At any other time he would have been piqued, moved to bring her back abruptly to himself, but now he felt it did not matter. She was in her own world: he himself was becoming involved in it. A warmth flowed through him as he became conscious of the contact with her knee under the table, of the way the half-caste woman kept the pair of them covered with her liquid, mischievous eyes as she slipped in and out. The place had an atmosphere of home. He could imagine passing his days here, fishing from the crumbling breakwater, coming in to crack jokes with the half-caste woman in the kitchen as he cleaned his catch.
And there was no word of young Leo. He could not bring himself to ask about the boy.
When he noticed a crumpled newspaper lying on the lounge he was moved to guy Neda.
“So you do get a paper, after all? Ever look at it, do you?” “Sometimes,” she admitted lightly. “I have to keep up with Rosa.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have to know about the cyclone that’s brewing out at Willis Island and the whale that’s been washed up on the beach.”
“H’m. That’s the news for you, then?”
“For the time being. It’s not absolute. Nothing’s absolute. In some ways you have to follow the interests of the people around you. It might be different if I were living with you, Macy, instead of Rosa.”
There was a flicker of mischief in her eyes, but it faded as Rosa herself came tripping into the room on light, naked feet. Rosa was in a flutter: the fishermen had been calling to her to come out and watch.
“It’s the mullet. They’s moving in. Quick! Might be you see them from here.”
A childish excitement glittered in her eyes as she drew Donovan to the window. What was probably the last mullet shoal of the season was forging with the slowness of an iceberg up the coast. A couple of miles out, between the faint headlands, a whitish patch of curdled water struck the eye and a rusty crying came from the cloud of sea-birds above the submerged mass. Confused shouting arose from the mouth of the saltwater creek. The fishermen were getting their boats ready and paying their nets into them.
“They’s coming in!” Rosa chattered excitedly. “Look! They’s some of them already over the bar!”
Donovan wandered down to watch them, but soon came back to where Neda had begun work again on the stone. She did not want to talk. He lay on the grass twenty feet away, smoking and taking in the lines of her intent face, which was half turned from him, outlined against the faded green of the tea-tree hedge. There was a babyish fullness about her profile with its wide mouth and pudgy chin; it was not her most beautiful aspect. Yet in spite of the slight thickening of her figure she seemed no different, Donovan felt, from the girl he had sometimes met trudging over the spinifex plain with a bag on her shoulders to get clay for her modelling from the springs in the dry creek-bed. There was the same homeliness about her, the same suggestion of mystery. No other woman, he told himself, had touched his senses and imagination as she had; no other woman ever would. Where did she draw the power from that allowed her to put such life into those heavy limbs of stone?
From the beach came the drowsy swish of small waves spreading over the sand. Donovan was caught up in a fantasy. Ever since he had come out of his house at the Hamilton two mornings ago and driven off into the dark he had had a sense of having left his ordinary life behind him. He had hardly thought of Kitty: there was no real explanation he could give her; whatever feeling he had had for her had gone dead. Even his anger at the way she had hidden from him her dealings with Brian had leaked away. Had she kept the transaction in the background so that she could spring it on him at a crucial moment? It did not seem to matter. She had no more reality for him than she had for Neda.
Neda working away there with her hammer and chisel, and not even knowing Kitty’s name! Neda to whom, in one part of his being, he had always been secretly pledged! This was his homecoming, his fulfilment. He had reached a World in which Kitty was an outsider. He watched the coloured woman come to the kitchen door to shake out the tablecloth: she caught his eye and gave her happy understanding smile that showed the gap between her upper teeth.
She’s ready to take me over, and no questions asked, he thought.
It seemed that this place belonged to a past he and Neda had shared, one they had inhabited together, one in which Kitty had no part, and that the coloured woman had belonged to it, too. Coming in upon them with her great motherly breasts, her rich, toothless smile, her stories of stranded whales and mullet shoals. Laughing with them and maybe making love with some fisherman in the kitchen when the day’s work was done. Was it the coloured woman he was thinking of now, or May? May, Neda’s mother, the gusty old warrior who was one of the first into Golconda, May with her warmth and high spirits, picking him up on the road as she came rattling along in her buckboard behind a string of donkeys!
“You’ve struck a bad day, Macy. I’ve just got to keep going. Why not go in and listen to some of Rosa’s stories?”
He sat up and saw Neda looking at him over her shoulder.
“I’m right. And what’s this about it being a bad day? It looks pretty good to me. And there’ll be plenty others.”
It was as far as he had travelled in thinking about the future.
Towards the end of the afternoon he wandered down to lend the fishermen a hand with their nets. The mullet had come in and were spreading out among the shallows at the mouth of the saltwater creek. In the reedy water they could be dimly seen, their heads to the current, their fins flickering in unexpected flashes of light. A sober intensity held the fishermen as they steered their dinghies around them, paying out their nets. It was the last bit of easy money for them till the beginning of next winter. From now on they would have to go out with handlines into deep water.
Donovan took off his coat to lend his weight to the net nearest the beach, keeping time with the slow, rhythmic heave of the other men. It gave him a fillip to feel his muscles respond to the strain; the smell of brine and mullet-weed came pleasantly to his senses. Leaning back on the rope he watched the arc of corks draw in closer, searched expectantly in the bag of the net. It was only a moderate catch, not what he had anticipated from the weight, but there were other boats out among the sandbanks.
He was standing back, lighting a cigarette, when a sharp call sounded from the low cliff behind him.
“Hey!”
He switched round to see a slim youth in an orange jumper grinning at him, his figure outlined against the darkening sky, his features hardly visible in the dim light. Donovan felt a hard mask slip over his face and a sudden tautness come to his body. He guessed who the boy was: how had he come to forget him? And why had Neda kept from mentioning his name?
“Hey,” came the voice again. “They’ve got the meal ready. If you’re staying you’d better come in.”
There was a touch of light insolence in the tone, but only a touch. Donovan did not reply as he made back towards the house. Now for the showdown, he was thinking; now for the test of whose voice carries most weight. For the first time he was unsure of himself: he did not know how to handle this youngster. Their positions had changed since the last time he had met him and he had seen and heard enough of young Leo to recognize that he would be a tough nut to crack, especially in his mother’s home. The fantasies of the afternoon seemed to crumple up behind him like a paper streamer; he felt a heavy air of authority creeping over him, stiffening him, altering his very walk. He would stand no nonsense from the youngster, he told himself: if he played up he would assert his power.
Get him sent back to Brentford pronto, he thought. At least show him it’s on the cards. He’s only out on sufferance.
But when they met again in the light of the living-room he was half embarrassed by the boy’s easy assurance and the subtle change that had come over him. Leo was on good terms with Rosa: he joked with her and skipped about from the table to the kitchen, helping her carry in the dishes, moving between the chairs with a comic dexterity. Rosa laughed till her fat sides shook at the way he imitated an Italian waiter at Wannan’s, and even Neda seemed to be caught up in the boy’s gaiety.
You see, her eyes said to Donovan, there was no need to worry. It’s come out all right, after all.
Donovan was not so sure. He could not recapture the idyllic mood of the afternoon; that impudent call was vibrating in his ears. And he was unreasonably hipped by the way Neda had taken on all the airs of a mother: her very skin seemed to have changed its texture. Across the table he watched the boy from beneath gloomy brows—the mobile lips, the smooth, arrogant little nose, the eyes that moved so swiftly in his olive face. Leo was telling how some cases of peanut oil had been jettisoned from a Chinese boat and had come ashore near one of the saltwater lakes; with Joe he had lugged them over the bar of sand and rafted them up among the tea-trees. Some night they were going up, he said, with a truck to bring them in. He chuckled as he recounted the ways they had outwitted the fishermen who were searching the beach for jettisoned cargo.
“But is all that legal?” asked Neda, bending over the teapot.
“No,” said Donovan flatly. “The law about jettisoned cargo is clear as day.”
“Joe and I were going to read it up,” said the boy with a twinkle. “We thought we’d make sure of our position before we tried to sell the stuff. But I guess there’s no informers in this place likely to give us away. They’re all working-men like us trying to make a do of things.”
There was a subtle mockery in his eyes. Yet Donovan was baffled by the way he could suddenly change his tone and become suave if he were challenged. There was no coming to grips with the youngster: he was slippery as a squid. In his presence Donovan felt diminished in some way, not fully himself, and he was conscious that it had a similar effect on Neda. She was intent on cutting bread or serving another helping of fish; an amiable nullity enfolded her. Her very voice seemed to have lost its personal resonance.
He talked to her directly, ignoring the boy and his innuendoes. His mind was on the figure that stood outside on the grass. Now that the darkness hid it and he could only remember its shape it seemed more and more repellent to him. He remembered Neda saying that it had had its origin in a memory of Dora; but what connection had Dora Mahony with that tragic creature who seemed to be crying out against the burden of her womanhood?
Neda met his questions with a queer evasiveness.
Don’t bring that up now, Macy, her eyes said.
But the way she turned to the boy and tried to draw him into the conversation exasperated Donovan. He had had enough of the boy.
“You did change your first idea of it,” he persisted.
“I suppose I did,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It isn’t easy to explain. You have an idea, but while you’re working it slips away and is replaced by another one. One more vital. Perhaps it’s your hands taking charge, perhaps it’s something in the stone itself.”
Donovan’s eyes took on a bullish look.
“That doesn’t sound sense to me.”
“Well, you shouldn’t push me, Macy,” she said lightly. “I never learned to talk intelligently about my work. Leave that to others.”
“Like Byrne, I suppose.”
“Him if you like. Anyone but me. That was always my feeling, and I was backed up by my first teacher, who used to say that what could be put into words wouldn’t have any meaning in stone or bronze. I stick to that: it reassures me. When other people talk about my work I always feel they’re a bit above my head.”
Her eyes fluttered to the boy as if she were shy of such discussions before him. Plainly Leo was piqued because he had lost their attention; there was a challenge in his restless movements, his truculent eyes. Wandering about the room, he picked up a book from the sofa and flung it down again, played a rat-tat with a cord of the blind, finally turned to the mantelpiece and began fingering the little plaster bust that reproduced his own elusive smile.
“That’s about the only thing I’ve ever done that pleased everyone,” said Neda, following him with her eyes.
“It doesn’t please me,” said the boy, looking at it critically.
“Now, Leo,” said Neda placatingly, “you only say that to be contrary. You know you liked it at the time.”
“Did I? Perhaps I said things to flatter you.”
“You?” she said, smiling ironically.
“Anyhow, I’ve come to hate the sight of it. Why didn’t you sell it or give it away? It’s followed us around too long. This is what I feel about it.”
And, holding it poised for a moment, he let it fall on the brick floor: it was shattered into a dozen pieces.
Donovan leapt up, flinging back his chair, an animal growl in his throat. It seemed as if he had been holding himself in restraint all evening, waiting for some such provocation; as if nothing could prevent him now from catching hold of the grinning youngster and shaking the life out of him. But a glance at Neda kept him in check. She had not moved and was quite unruffled: though her colour had heightened there was an indifferent smile on her face.
“Well, that’s that,” she said after a moment.
The boy was looking at her with the smile of the broken figurine.
“You don’t care?”
“Not if you really meant it. Not if you weren’t just being vindictive. I suppose it was your property rather than mine.”
She got up as Rosa came in to clear the table. Donovan moved out to the balcony overlooking the water. He was beside himself with rage. It would not die down: it turned inward upon himself. Why had he allowed the young dingo to come out from the place where he was caged? Why had he forced himself to stand by dumbly and watch that display of perversity? Why had he let Neda lay a restraint on him?
The boy turned on the wireless and the room behind him echoed with its meaningless sound. Donovan was overcome with the same sense of frustration as when he had encountered that other Farelli twenty years before at the soak.
“They’re still out after the mullet,” said a quiet voice beside him.
He smelt Neda’s hair in the dusk, felt the pressure of her hand on his upper arm, but the weight of his anger was still heavy on him.
“Now look, Neda,” he began, “there’s no use pretending nothing’s happened. It’s damned well time to face up to things. That young devil’s got you down on the mat and he’ll keep you there. I’ve made up my mind—”
She interrupted him. “I know what you’re going to say, Macy. Don’t.”
“You’d let him get away with murder.”
“It’s nothing at all like that. It’s just a flare-up.”
“And the next one will be just another?”
“Such explosions don’t occur often. He was upset at getting home and finding you here.”
Donovan gave a grunt. “So that’s it? And I’m to accept the knock, am I, and keep away?”
“Don’t take it like that, Macy,” she pleaded. “I’ll answer for him not being so impossible again.”
There was an intimate, caressing note in her voice, in the movement of her hands. For the first time Donovan felt his passion for her a burden on him. He seemed to hear a cackle of derisive laughter from the room behind.
