The Big Fellow, page 27
“What a family party!” she said. “Where’s Kitty? Why didn’t she come?”
Glancing at Sandra, Flo replied that Kitty was away at Tamborine.
“I persuaded her to go. Not without a good deal of sheer bullying. But it’s not so pleasant for her being there down at the Hamilton alone with people asking questions she can’t answer. She’s better away.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Sandra emotionally. “I hope she’ll stay till all this fuss is over. Poor old Kitty!”
“Why poor?” rapped out Judy.
Sandra looked at Flo as if she were not sure whether to let even this sister of theirs in on the private matter they had been mulling over together. Neither of them quite trusted Judy.
“Oh, well,” said Flo at last, “it’s pretty plain that Macy’s gone in off the deep end with someone else, even if Kitty doesn’t know it. I suppose she’s bound to find out before long, but it’s better she shouldn’t hear about it from some gossipy old trout who’d give it a nasty twist. I can think of more than one woman who’d like to be the first one to break the news.”
Standing with her back to the dresser Judy said robustly, “I believe it’s all boloney.”
“You do?” Flo challenged her. “Are you so closely in touch with him?”
“Just because he didn’t turn up today!”
“Not at all,” said Flo. “The evidence was clear enough before that. Only too beastly clear. I used to talk as if it would be fun if Macy broke loose and let himself go—I ought to have had my tail soundly smacked. It’s not a bit of fun seeing poor old Kitty hurt.”
She went on to recount the experience of her friends, the Veblens, who had been passing Coulter’s Headland on their way back from a trip up the coast. They had stayed at the place often and decided to look in on the chance of its being occupied by some of the family. What a reception they had been given! As soon as they saw Macy and this woman lying in their bathers on the grass, Esther knew how badly they had slipped, but it had been hard to get Franz away. The stupidity of men! He had met Macy there before; he wanted to ask him certain things about the Commission. It was only when they were driving home that he could be brought to see the reason for the thunderstorm that had broken over his head.
“And now, I suppose,” Judy said dryly, “the story’s all over the place.”
“It isn’t,” said Sandra. “Kitty doesn’t know a thing—not a thing. If you knew how hard it was to get her away! Just imagine! She felt, poor dear, she ought to go up quietly and submissively to Coulter’s Headland and try to make it up with Macy.”
“Yet it must have been going on for quite a long time,” put in Flo. “Last Easter at Coulter’s Headland—where was Macy then? Not opening some cattle-show in the country, I’ll guarantee. God alone knows where the two of them were weekending. Frank thinks that even this Commission … Mightn’t it be a neatly contrived arrangement to allow Macy to go into smoke?”
“That’s nonsense,” Judy said emphatically.
But there was a shadow of uncertainty in her eyes.
“Who is this woman?” she said.
“Ask Peter,” Flo replied. “He knows all about her.”
“I’ve been talking to Peter, but he never even mentioned her.” “Peter hasn’t put two and two together,” said Flo. “I wouldn’t encourage him to. She’s got a place up near Coulter’s Headland and Peter dropped in on her there two or three months ago. A sculptress from Sydney, it seems, who’s doing a figure for the Women’s Hospital. Or that’s the legend. But Macy’s association with her goes right back to Golconda.”
“I hate talking scandal,” said Sandra, her eyes becoming self-absorbed. “I haven’t even discussed this with Hugh. It would spoil his trip—I know it will spoil mine. Why should this happen, I’ve been asking myself, just when we’re going away? Just think—all those weeks on the water with this coming between me and whatever I look at.”
Frank was standing at the door with both hands on the lintel, his eyes twinkling facetiously as he looked at Judy. All the others were gone: either Hugh or himself, he suggested, would drive her back to the hospital.
“Unless you’ve decided to stay and continue the debate,” he added, putting his arm round her with a mock-affectionate gesture. “You’d better stay, Judy.”
Chapter XXVI
What was the secret of the power Donovan still had over her, Judy was asking herself as she drove her small car through the outer suburbs in the early dawn and made towards Coulter’s Headland. There was not a vestige left of the passionate feeling for him that had tormented her as a girl. She could smile at the memory of the ferment he had aroused in her; the ache in her flesh he had no impulse to allay, the nobility she had seen in his attitudes, the nights she had spent at her desk in a kind of coma, waiting for the telephone to ring, going out for a few moments to the balcony now and then to watch time inch by on the face of the big station-clock. She had had relations with other men since then that had matured her emotionally, and no sentimental hang-over disturbed her contacts with Donovan now when he occasionally dropped in at the hospital for a talk. Yet there was this impulse driving her … I won’t be satisfied till I see him, she told herself.
Hardly one of Donovan’s failings had escaped her critical eye. She knew how vague were the ideas that had carried him through his political life, and how his reputation for strength rested largely on a capacity for bluff. He had not grown in stature as she had imagined he would; he was still living in a world that had not changed since his youth. Yet something remained from the fantasies with which she had once surrounded him. For her he still carried a reflection of the heroic figures she had dreamed of in her girlhood—Garibaldi, Lincoln, Lane and the rest; like them, she imagined, he stood for something in the life of the people that was thrusting forward into the future. And her feeling for him was mixed up with impulses of personal loyalty—the impulses that had made her work so devotedly for Hugh McCoy at St Monica’s, though she had never really believed in her vocation as a nurse. She could not bear to think of Macy weakening now, letting all he had built up fall with a crash, and his name, with all the well-to-do toadies and society women, become a synonym for cowardice and corruption.
Perhaps (she had left the outskirts of the town behind) a spell had been laid upon him by this woman he had taken up with; perhaps he didn’t know how the crows were gathering around him! A sense of foreboding had weighed her down that first day when he had not appeared in court, and she could tell from her talk with Peter Mahony in the McCoys’ garden that he was oppressed by the same feeling. It had been sharpened by what she had heard from Flo and Sandra, and she had gone home to lie awake and wonder if something more than a sudden passion for a particular woman had taken hold of him, if he was not surrendering to a primitive urge to shake off all responsibilities and let everything go hang.
She herself had experience of such urges. What else was it that had taken hold of her five years ago, when she had let Dinny persuade her that the world they knew was falling to pieces and that she owed him a little happiness before the end. Gaunt and sun-darkened he had looked in his worn uniform, his smouldering eyes shining out tragically from their bony caverns, and with the Japs threatening to overrun the country it seemed that her personal life no longer mattered very much. She had been carried away by the hysteria of the time and by some sickness in her blood; yet it had been a collapse of her essential self and she had paid heavily for it. Only a strong effort of will had enabled her to pull herself out of that mess.
Macy, she felt, could not renew himself as easily as she could. He lived in the public eye: if he lost control of himself now it would be the end of him. Nothing before him but to eke out a living in small jobs and make sour gibes at the men who had taken his place. It might be that she could help him to see this.
Perhaps he’ll turn on me and tear me to pieces, the big bulldog, she thought lightly. It doesn’t matter: I can take it.
It was many years since she had been to Coulter’s Headland, except for one short visit during the war when Sandra had been ill and the place itself had seemed part of the battle area, with American troops strung out along the beaches to the north and the rattle of machine-guns coming from distant ridges. As she brought the car down along the narrow track at the back she saw no sign of life, but a deck-chair was stretched on the cropped grass in front, and two washed shirts were drying on a dead banksia-limb. At the sound of her horn a frail, leathery-faced old woman emerged from the kitchen: it was Mrs Katz, the widow who lived on her pension somewhere among the tea-tree and had always been ready to come and attend to things when the house was occupied.
“Mr Donovan not about?” she asked her.
The woman looked at her a while without answering: she did not recognize her; she seemed bewildered.
“He’s down at the store, I think,” she said at last.
“And will he be home for lunch?”
“It’s likely he will be,” the woman said vaguely.
She did not seem so much suspicious as puzzled. Judy glanced around swiftly, but saw no signs of any other woman about the place. Donovan’s bed had been made up on the veranda, covered with a striped rug. A battery wireless stood on the table beside it and a pair of folded dungarees were lying draped over a suitcase.
“You’re Mrs Katz, aren’t you?” said Judy. “I’m Matron Hegarty, Mr Donovan’s sister-in-law. If he comes back tell him I’m here and that I’ve gone down for a swim.”
She took her bathers from the car and followed the path down the cliff. As she undressed among the rocks the smell of drying kelp and the popping of small shelled things opening in the sun overwhelmed her with memories. A listless sea was washing into the crevices, making small sucking noises, and little crabs scuttled over the crumbling granite. Two miles out, Old Woman Island lay stretched along the skyline like a sleeping reptile, its back encrusted with marine growths.
Judy lay on a slab of rock and closed her eyes. It was long since she had come so far away from her daily round. The scents, the penetrating warmth, the faint thump of the sea, were cracking open the thin shell formed by mechanical tasks, and releasing feelings she had known when life lay before her with all its possibilities of ecstasy and personal hurt.
No post-mortems, she told herself, springing up and making for the water.
The tide was half-way out, but the combers were breaking with a long roll on the outer bar of sand. It gave her a fillip to find that she could still catch them at the right moment, gather up for her use all the power behind them, and come flying in on their crests. There had been times when she had wondered if her body had remained alive: it was so long since she had taken pleasure in it. Yet here it was, tingling to the surge of water over it, to the salty chill, to the friction of the sand when she was washed up in the shallows.
It’s not really such a wreck, she thought, scrutinizing it whimsically as she dried herself among the rocks. It won’t let me down for a while yet. A week or two here and they’d let me parade with the life-savers.
She had a secret fear of growing old. She was ashamed of it, but there it was. She had to do with so many women a little more battered by life than herself, and saw her own image in them—in those crushed features, that flabby skin, those drooping mouths, those shapeless limbs that were dead to any sensation but pain. And there was Kitty trying desperately to camouflage the fact that she was already past fifty!
“Oho! Kitty again,” she mocked at her reflected self in the rock-pool.
Donovan was standing under the banksia threading a line into his rod when she climbed back to the house. There was such a suggestion of energy and well-being about his thick figure in its open-necked shirt and short knickers that she was somehow taken aback. He did not seem surprised at her appearance; he gave her a wave of the hand from thirty yards away and went on threading his rod. She could not tell whether he was pleased to see her or not.
“I thought I’d run up and tell you about the opening of the Commission,” she said lightly. “You weren’t down.”
“No,” he said. “Did anyone expect me?”
“I did,” she said. “I thought the situation demanded it.”
“It didn’t,” he replied shortly. “There was nothing to bring me down. What did you want me to do? Appear for the photographers? Anyhow, my car’s in hospital. It won’t be out till tomorrow.”
He listened to what she had to tell him, but not with very much interest. Yet there was nothing aloof or deeply self-absorbed about him; he was mainly concerned with the way the line was running from the reel. Evidently he had been swimming at some other part of the beach, for a towel was drying on a nearby limb and his greyish-black hair stood up stiffly from his crown. A day-old growth of beard darkened his chin.
“Come inside,” he said. “Mrs Katz will get us some lunch. I expect it’s ready now.”
Sitting in the living-room under old McCoy’s portrait, she began to wonder why she had come. There was no sign that Macy was not fully in possession of himself. He seemed perfectly at his ease, not inclined to ask questions, not curious about her appearance there on a working-day. It was all so different from what she had anticipated when she had lain awake turning over Flo’s insinuations about the way he had cracked now that the strain had come. Judy watched the stooped figure of Mrs Katz, who was laying the table. Plainly Macy got along well with her; he was exchanging some banter with her about the possums that had been playing on the roof the night before: he had had to get up and drive them off with a shotgun.
“I was afraid you’d come running over thinking the Nips had really got through this time, Mrs Katz.”
She smiled her elderly smile. “Oh, there’s nothing rouses me, Mr Donovan, once I do get to sleep.”
No hint in Donovan’s manner of any preoccupation with this other woman who must be somewhere in the background! Or was she merely a figure of fantasy after all?
It was only when the old woman had gone and they were sitting down at the table that he turned to her and said with a challenging twinkle, “Why did you come, Judy? Thought I’d tossed in the towel, eh, and was using this place for a hide-out?”
No, she told him, but there were others who might.
“The Big Fellow can’t take it, eh? Opened up this business about Mount Clutha, but thought better of it, and when the bell went made for cover.”
“Something like that.”
Donovan said with a grin, “What other people thought about me, Judy, never troubled me a hell of a lot. When I first went into political life I got a kick from the other side’s attack: it seemed evident I’d made a bit of a dint on the world around me. But that was a long time ago. Now I’m not sure it’s proof even of that. Here I can get outside myself. I listen to the news and when I hear them rattling off my name it seems to me they’re talking about someone else. Someone I don’t want to have any truck with. Donovan? What’s all the mag about that fellow? I turn off the sound-box and go down to throw a line out for snapper. Great, the fun of hauling in a five-pounder! I don’t know why I never found it out before.”
He was chuckling with apparent self-satisfaction.
She said dryly, “You talk, Macy, as if you’re only interested in your own sensations. As if you’d no sense of responsibility to other people.”
“Other people?” he repeated quizzically.
“There are people who depend on you,” she said. “People who’ve a right to expect that you won’t let them down.”
“Kitty, I suppose,” he said mechanically.
Her eyes snapped and she said with an outburst of feeling that surprised herself, “I wasn’t thinking of Kitty at all! Her affairs mean just nothing to me!”
There was a moment’s silence between them. Even Donovan seemed embarrassed as he concentrated upon his food. After a while he laid down his knife and fork and looked at her curiously.
“Then it wasn’t any prompting from Kitty that made you come?”
“No,” she said. “You know well enough, Macy, that Kitty and I hardly ever see one another.”
“That’s so,” he said, taking out his tobacco. “I’ve often wondered why.”
She looked at him guardedly.
Is he probing me? she was thinking. Does he want to get satisfaction from opening up that grave?
Aloud she said, playing with her teaspoon, “There’s no particular reason. Kitty’s interests aren’t mine. Do we have to live in one another’s pockets because we’re sisters?”
She remembered suddenly that it was she who had first talked to him of Kitty. That was when he was lying stretched on a hospital bed, a strange interloper in that world of women, and she was beating round for some way of making contact with him, hoping to tempt him to open up about his background by gossiping about her own.
Watching her now with half-abstracted eyes he said reflectively, “So you haven’t seen her?”
“She did drop in on me a couple of weeks ago,” Judy admitted. “I should think it was with a faint hope of finding out where you’d gone. You hadn’t told her.”
“Hadn’t I? She could have found out easily enough from Sandra. Did she own up about the way she’d double-crossed me?”
A hint of feeling had come into his voice. Judy sensed it and drew in upon herself. Kitty had been worried, she said shortly, about having kept quiet about some shares Brian had given her. She hadn’t paid much attention to what Kitty had said.
“It wasn’t my business. I didn’t even want to hear about it.”
“Why not? It isn’t just a private matter between the two of us,” Donovan said harshly.
A change came over his face as he began to recount the story of the shares. There was no longer a teasing light in his eyes: they had become hard, opaque, vindictive, and his forehead was flushed beneath its tan. What defence could a man make, he asked with an animal growl in his voice, when it came out that his wife was holding shares in a mine he had advocated the Government buying? Swear he knew nothing about it? Who on God’s earth would be likely to believe that? And who would want them to believe it? Wouldn’t a man rather be thought a shyster than a spineless half-wit who let his wife play hell with his reputation behind his back?
