The Big Fellow, page 6
He suddenly saw the bright, humorous eyes of Chester Byrne fixed on him across the room, and pulled himself together, feeling he had been dreaming, laying himself wide open. There was a bite in his voice when he went to pour himself out a drink and found Kitty alone at the little table near the door.
“Is this a private affair, or isn’t it?” he snapped. “How did that fellow Byrne come to be here?”
“Byrne?” she repeated in surprise. “I asked him, of course.” “You did?”
“And why on earth shouldn’t I? He hasn’t been up north here for I don’t know how long, and I thought you’d be pleased to meet him.”
“The hell I am,” he muttered. “A great mind-reader you are!”
But she had flitted away from him. Flo and Sandra were going, and she had a feeling that Macy, coming in late, had given them the cold shoulder. He had not spoken even to Hugh, and, apart from Judy, Hugh was the only one of her family for whom he had a real respect.
But it was not this that brought the wrinkle to her smooth forehead, the touch of uneasiness to her eyes. For all her easy good-humour that carried her lightly over the surface of things, she was acutely perceptive where Macy was concerned, and knew intuitively when there was the slightest alteration in his mind’s secret rhythm.
Why, in the name of God, can I never do anything that pleases him? she was thinking.
Chapter V
Young Mahony and Sheila had slipped out into the garden and made their way through the grape-trellis to the lower side of the tennis-court where a branching jacaranda created its own privacy. Dancing lights on the water, voices from the river-road, a scent of oleanders floating through the warm dusk! The girl was unstrung and a little above herself. Mahony had noticed it when he came in with her father, noticed the unusual brightness of her eyes, the fluency of her voice, the way she continually put her fingers to the side of her forehead as if feeling for a pulse.
“Come on out, Peter,” she had whispered. “I can’t stand it here any longer. I’ve been listening to these old mummies and trying to believe they’re really alive. They’re not. And there’s something I want to talk over.”
She stood now, leaning one shoulder against the jacaranda, her body slack and irresolute, her eyes fixed on the chrysanthemums she was pulling to pieces with nervous fingers. How many times, Mahony wondered, had he seen her in this attitude since that first evening, nearly twelve years before, when she had brought him out here, a shy youngster, after the evening meal? It was the place they had always come to when there were quarrels to make up or plans to be discussed. If they were discovered by Kevin they could easily pretend to be hunting for tennis-balls in the long grass.
Mahony watched the girl’s face in the dusk, knowing she had something to say to him, unwilling to give her a lead. There was a coldness inside him. He was beginning to resent the way she tried to infect him with her own moods. Suddenly she threw the remaining petals down, trampling them into the damp earth with the toe of her shoe.
“It’s no good, Peter. I’ve come to a dead end. I’m trying to get away.”
“Away? Where?”
“Can’t you guess? There’s only one place that could be in my mind and it’s at least a couple of thousand miles away. The American Army is asking for half a dozen girls who worked with them here. I suppose my chance of being accepted is as good as any.”
He felt a chill spread through him.
“I suppose so. Particularly if your father used his influence. But will he?”
“You know he won’t,” she said. “How could I ask him? He’s not so dumb that he wouldn’t guess why I wanted to go. And, short of putting me behind bars, he’d be all out to stop me. No, I’ll just have to try and work it on my own and, if I get through, make him face the accepted fact. He’ll do that without raising too much of a racket: he’s got plenty of things on his mind just now. And he’s the only one of the family I care about.”
The only one she cares about, he was thinking: does she really care? How much is she capable of caring about anyone?
He said, trying to keep control of his voice, “You’re still wrapped up in that fellow, Sheila?”
“Still?” she repeated with a touch of impatience. “Did you think it was just a flash in the pan? Yes, I’m wrapped up in him, Peter—utterly, once and for all. If I’m expecting a letter and it doesn’t come, that’s the end of the day for me. Nothing left me but to lie on the bed imagining all sorts of things—that he’s dead, that he’s found another girl, that I’ll never hear anything more from him. Even if I do get a letter—well, it’s never satisfying: Michael simply can’t write letters that mean anything. I know before I open one that it’ll be chock-full of accounts of the good time he’s having—full of everything but what I want to hear. Sometimes—would you believe it?—I’ve kept a letter of his a whole day without opening it, dreaming of what might be in it but isn’t likely to be. I can’t go on like this. There’s not a moment of the day I’m not thinking of him. I’m no good to myself or anyone else.”
She was resting her whole weight against the tree, her head turned away from him.
He said in a matter-of-fact voice, “How long did you know Sealy here, Sheila? A little over three months, wasn’t it?”
She winced as if he had touched a nerve.
“What does it matter? How can you measure time, anyway? One day may be nothing, the next part of infinity. You’ve never been in love, Peter.”
“No?”
“No, you never have,” she insisted. “You think you’re in love with me, but you’re not. Why not be honest with yourself, Peter? What you feel is the sort of snuggly affection that comes from the way we’ve grown up together. Don’t think I’m not grateful for it; you’ve been good to me, Peter. But you never notice what I’m wearing, how I look, or whether I’m in the mood to throw myself under the next tram that comes along. Your head’s full of all sorts of things—some symphony you’ve heard, who’s going to profit from the war, what you’re going to make of your life and so on. I know; I’ve watched you so long and so often. When your eyes have been lit up it hasn’t been by me.”
He muttered, defensively, that he was not one to broadcast his feelings.
“And you think I am? I’m not. There’s no one in the world I’d talk to like this but you.”
There was a retort on the tip of his tongue, but he checked it. He felt a protective hardness steal over him, insulating him against hurt. Did she know how humiliating this confession could have been to him? And were all women like that—self-absorbed, insensitive, blind to everything but their own feelings?
“All right,” he said. “You love this fellow Sealy, and you’re going to make a big effort to get to him. Has he shown that he wants you to come?”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t think he’s thought of it.”
“But you’re dead sure he’d be glad if you did?”
“No,” she said with desperate frankness. “I can’t even be sure of that. I’m not going to pretend, Peter—either to you or myself. Michael’s so easily attracted by women. Even when he was here, having dinner at some café, the sight of a pretty girl smiling at him from another table could pull him up in the middle of a sentence: he’d laugh at himself and make up for it a dozen ways, but there it was; he simply couldn’t help responding to a look or a smile. If I were certain he wouldn’t forget me I wouldn’t be so mad to get near him again. What’s the good of ‘ifs’, though? Life’s got no meaning for me away from him. That’s how it’s come to be.”
He said stonily, “So you’re willing to trample that pride of yours underfoot? You don’t trust this fellow, really; you believe he might drop you for another girl as soon as he’s out of your sight. Yet you’re ready to chuck up everything for him—to ruin your whole life.”
A flash of scorn passed through his eyes.
“Is that really you talking, Peter? ‘Ruin your whole life!’ How much do words like that mean?”
“All right,” he said. “Put it another way. You’re willing to risk your future on the chance of this coming out jake.”
“Yes, I suppose I am. But I don’t see what there is to risk. Once I thought there wouldn’t be anything worth living for if I couldn’t make a name on the stage. The way I worked to get a part in one of these repertory shows; you know how it was with me—for weeks I’d be saying over the lines in my sleep. Now acting doesn’t matter a damn to me—neither does any other career. And I don’t care if Michael doesn’t want to marry me; I’d be satisfied just to be near him … Don’t think I’m proud of letting myself be driven like this: sometimes I hate myself for being so abject. But what can I do, Peter? I can’t take any interest in what’s going on around me—can’t even read a book; nothing but the memory of the days I spent with Michael has any reality for me. You think I’ve just got my head turned, that I’m sunk in a moony dream of meeting him up there and living happily ever after. No, I’m not so silly as all that. I know well enough what’s ahead of me, what I’ll have to go through. But it just doesn’t matter. I can put up with anything from Michael—anything … You’ll have to help me, Peter.”
He said with a touch of roughness, “Hell! So that’s what I’m for!”
“You’ve always helped me,” she said. “That is, when you could bring yourself to find out what I was after.”
“They weren’t things that would make a crawler of me.” He turned away and looked up at the house. Donovan had said he wanted the car for the morning; he would have to leave it and make his own way home. The girl straightened herself and brushed the hair from her eyes. Her outburst had calmed her but seemed to have left her empty.
She said in a flat voice, as if disappointed by his response, “You believe I’ve just gone to pieces, Peter?”
“I believe you’ve been swamped by a feeling that was in the air. That you’ve let it take possession of you and paralyse your will.”
“My will,” she repeated. “This is my will—to follow Michael … I’ve told you just how I feel, Peter, laid myself wide open. When you talk of something having taken possession of me … well, that’s plain enough. But it doesn’t make things any easier.”
“And how d’you expect me to help you?” he said with a sudden revulsion. “Persuade your father it’s a good thing for you to go? Use my little bit of influence with him? When he already guesses … What a squirt I’d seem to him! So I would be. My God, squirt isn’t the name for it! Putting up reasons why you should go off to another man!”
It was as if something hard and masculine in his voice penetrated the mist of self-absorption in which she was wrapped. A sudden softness spread through her; she put out her hand and pressed his wrist.
“I know I’m being horribly unfair to you, Peter.”
Both her touch and the caressing note in her voice repelled him.
He said derisively, “Unfair? Don’t press on the soft pedal, Sheila.”
She protested in a tearful tone, “You’re being resentful, Peter.”
“And you’re being sentimental. It doesn’t suit you. You’re not sentimental, Sheila—you’re tough.”
There seemed nothing more to be said. Voices suddenly sounded from the house thirty yards away and light flooded out over the tennis-court as people trickled down to their cars along the drive. The two went in together, walking a yard apart. Tough, Mahony was repeating to himself, yes, she’s tough, always was. I’m the sentimental one, really.
Chapter VI
Trudging along the river-road, his head down, his hair ruffled by the breeze Hitting up from the Bay, Peter Mahony was as unconscious of the oily, sucking water on his left as of the trams bumbling past him on the way to town. If it had not been for the saffron blur ahead of him he would hardly have known the direction in which he was heading.
You deserve all you got, he was telling himself. Been burying your head in the sand, haven’t you? Knowing she’d gone off the deep end with Sealy, pretending not to know. And keeping up all the old attitudes, hanging on. No wonder she couldn’t resist taking it out of you.
His anger against the girl was turning against himself. What was there lacking in him that had allowed her to take him so cheaply, ignoring all the devotion he had shown her, emptying the sack of her feelings for another man upon his head? Did she look on him as a sort of lackey, incapable of passion or jealousy? Well, there were good grounds for that. Hadn’t he let her dominate him since first he was taken into the Donovan home, playing up to her whims, surrendering to her demand that he should make her preoccupations his own? Looking back, he saw himself driving from the base-line hour after hour so that she could cultivate her volley at the net, mugging up German to keep pace with her, trailing with her to rehearsals in dreary studios so that he might tell her when she made a gesture that seemed false. Always, in one situation after another, there was the echo of her feverish voice:
“I’ll die if I don’t make a success of it this time. You’ve got to help me, Peter.”
The same voice was in his ears now. But there was a sort of exaltation in its tones, as if she were lifted above everyday trivialities by the intensity of her feeling, as if one side of her was drawing pleasure out of her suffering.
This is life, he could imagine her thinking. I’m caught up in it. I don’t care whether it destroys me or not.
But what was this life, he asked himself sourly, that she was caught up in? Nothing but the sensuous jamboree that had affected all the other sun-dazzled butterflies who had fluttered round the American troops since they first landed. He could not take her infatuation with Sealy as something individual and personal. If she had not met him she would have let all her yeasty emotions centre upon another man of his rank.
He winced away from the memory of her distraught face. That small hysterical mouth, those blue self-centred eyes with the glint of tears in them! Yet his sharpest contempt was for himself. The way he had let himself drift since they had brought him down from the line, letting Donovan pull strings to get him out of the Army, hanging onto the job he had found for him, even after the war finished.
“You’ve only got to stick where you are now, Peter, and wait awhile. Tread water until I get into my stride. Don’t let any nightmares about the future worry you.”
Half-desires that burned out with his cigarette, plans that came to nothing, a retreat into the consoling thought that his leg had been saved, after all. And Donovan’s assurances, as they drove home together, that from now on he would be on velvet. This was not the future he had imagined when, lying among the kunai-grass at Buna, he had found prayers for deliverance forming on his lips … “Oh, God, save me from this hell of blood and filth and I’ll give my life to your service. Oh, God, save me …”
Where, he wondered, had the prayer come from that had established such a definite rhythm in his mind that it repeated itself when the miracle happened and the stretcher-bearers were carrying him down the track? He hadn’t been brought up in any consciousness of God; he had no notion of what His service might mean. Yet lying in hospital all those months, dreaming, dozing, living with his senses wrapped in cotton-wool, it seemed as if it might be easy to keep the spirit of his vow. The old world he had taken on trust had collapsed at a thunder-blast, and he could only see it as a mess of shell-torn earth, severed limbs sticking up from the mud, bloated corpses around which the flies swarmed, blind eyes staring from bloody faces. Its death-cry was in those animal shrieks that came from the jungle and still echoed in his ears as he watched the night-nurses going their rounds. But a new world such as he sometimes imagined would rise from the chaos, and if he pulled through …
“Oh, Peter, what have they done to you? You’re just skin and bone: you look like a ghost.”
It had been Sheila, coming into the ward with a breathless rush, who had scattered his sober thoughts about the future and put him once more at the mercy of his senses. Sheila, looking more alluring than ever in her trim uniform, flooding the whole ward with her high spirits, teasing him about the good-looking young nurses attending him, boasting about her work with the Americans and the way they showered orchids upon her. She was driving brass-hats about the town and even on far trips to the country; she revelled in every detail of her job. It was as if the whole war had been designed to give her this new access of life and she could afford to bestow the overflow of it on him. Her hair brushing his face as she bent over to kiss him, the impulsive pressure of her hand on his upper arm, the challenge of her flying glance as she looked back from the door. It was the beginning of the paralysis that had broken down his will, steeping him in a euphoria that had kept him content even when he knew she was making a fool of him. He was conscious of a spasm of disgust. When would he learn to stand on his own feet?
“Hey, Peter!”
The lusty hail pulled him up with a start. He had been unaware that he had reached the heart of the town, where trams were bunched at the corners and people were scrambling from them into the wash of neon light that flooded the pavements. Peter felt a hearty hand thump him on the shoulder.
“Hell, Peter, where do you hide yourself? Somewhere in the outer suburbs? I’ve only seen you once since I came back.”
A thickset young fellow in a beret and dyed military tunic was gripping him by the upper arm and swinging him round challengingly. There was something about both the grip and the brown, prominent eyes that made a warm feeling well up in Peter. Seyler! Monty Seyler!
“That’s my bad luck, Monty,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you, too.”
“You have? Then that little rag of mine must make a poor show on the bookstalls. Of course I know it does—no one to push it but me … Here, there’s a pub I know just across the street—let’s see if we can find a quiet corner. I’ve a couple of tickets for a concert at the Town Hall, but I’ll give it a miss.”
