Riverslake Read online

  He was talking too casually now, and it was not lost on Murdoch. He had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Linda Spain since their first meeting. He and Murdoch went over to her home at least two nights a week, and they had met at a few dances and parties; he had been fascinated and then repelled and then again fascinated by her. Sometimes even, with a feeling of wonderment, he felt that he was falling in love with her. Usually he began an evening in her company by determining to follow up one of the open advances she made, but ended it more often than not by a casual and cool good night. On nights when he did play her game, and took her aside into the shadows of buildings and trees, he felt himself enveloped in a surge of passion that he had thought dead years ago. It burned him, and he tore his lips and body from hers almost hating her.

  “Cooling off, Lochinvar?” Murdoch inquired caustically.

  “Never got hot. I’d just rather Paul came with her, that’s all. He’s a good bloke, and the more I take her around, the—well the worse it gets for both of us. The worse it gets all round. I could dig up another sort to take to the Causeway.”

  “And I’d just as soon spend the night in the lion’s den at Taronga, if you did!” Murdoch laughed suddenly and loudly. “Can’t you just see Madame if you rolled up with another sort? Oh, momma!”

  “I didn’t know I was under contract,” Randolph observed coldly, but broke down under Murdoch’s laughter. “Oh, go and jump in the lake! I’ll take her all right, and you look out for squalls!”

  A curious and outmoded moral scruple held him back where Paul Spain’s wife was concerned. That Linda was another man’s wife counted for little, but that she was Paul Spain’s wife counted for everything. He had come to a curious liking for the pale, reserved man who seemed incapable of putting a halter on his wayward wife—or, perhaps, was unwilling to do it. Randolph sensed something not quite right in their set-up, and as he once observed to Murdoch, when the boy had been teasing him about her, it would be like taking a shot at a sitting bird to knock off Paul’s wife, and the bird would not be Linda, but Paul. Murdoch took another view, and was not slow to make it known. He said that if the bird was on the nest, then the best thing to do was to climb in alongside her. Randolph had laughed over it afterwards. With Murdoch, there were no fine distinctions, or so he would have the world believe. The spade was definitely a spade.

  “What do you think, Felix?” Randolph asked, turning to the Pole. “Would you like to come to the dance with us, and bring Marika?”

  “I very like,” Radinski replied. “If you and Mr Kerry there, O.K. I ask Mama Kasnik for Marika come.”

  “God, can’t she make up her own mind?” Murdoch demanded. “She’s a big girl now, you know.”

  “Please?”

  “Shut up, Kerry!” Randolph commanded. “You ask, Felix, and if Mama says O.K., then you tell us.”

  “Thank you,” Radinski replied, so simply that neither of the Australians listening to him could have any notion of the tumult their simple invitation unleashed in him.

  It was the first time in nearly two years that he had been asked to go anywhere with Australians, amongst Australians. He had begun to think that the merging with these people of his new land would never come. Now, out of nothing, suddenly he was invited to go to a dance with Australians, with men and women who would talk and dance and drink with him as they might with these men, Randolph and Murdoch, who walked beside him. It was unbelievable.

  He took a deep breath and looked round at the crowding night. It was too big. The land was too big. It was too big to encompass quickly, and perhaps he had hoped for too much, too quickly.

  I have to grow up again, he thought. In this land, I am a baby, and what is five, or even ten years out of all I have before me?

  “Thank you,” he said again. “I think Marika happy. She very like it dancing.”

  Chapter Six

  One Sunday afternoon, about a week after Mama Kasnik’s party, Murdoch knocked at Charlesworth’s door. He turned the key, which Charlesworth always left in the lock, and went in without waiting for an answer. Charlesworth was stretched on his rumpled bed, staring at the ceiling. As Murdoch walked in, he rolled his head round and grinned.

  “I’ve got no plonk, if that’s what you’re after!’’

  Murdoch did not answer immediately. He was looking round the room with an elaborate expression of distaste. Dirty aprons and soiled white trousers were draped over the back of the only chair. The Sunday papers, dismembered and scattered, littered the floor. The dressing-table was covered with cool-drink bottles and the stubs of cigarettes, and on the table stood a plate with some greasy toast and a half-emptied mug of coffee, cold and covered with a thick film.

  “For God’s sake,” he exclaimed at length, “what a brothel!”

  “It’s me home,” Charlesworth said, with a laugh.

  “Why in hell don’t you clean it up once in a while? It’s like a Chinese joss-house!”

  “Too much fag.”

  “Well, spring off your tail and come up to Ainslie with me—there’s a hockey match on that should be good.”

  “Where’s Bob?”

  “He’s gone to see some people.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “I didn’t want to. Come on, get up.”

  “No, Kerry.” Charlesworth stretched and yawned. “Too much fag—I’d have to have a shave and a bath and everything.”

  “Well, hell—that wouldn’t kill you. Or would it?” Murdoch picked up a coloured supplement from the floor and studied it. “Why don’t you go and see your sheila?”

  “And have that bloody old dragon breathing down the back of my neck?” Charlesworth demanded with swift anger. “Not this baby!”

  “Yeah—what an old chromo! Still, you can’t lie here all day.’

  “You watch my dust!”

  Murdoch dropped the paper to the floor and walked to the door, stepping with exaggerated daintiness over the piled rubbish. “I’m off,” he announced. “If I meet any bagmen on the way, I’ll tell ’em where to come.”

  “Dip your eye,” Charlesworth said laconically.

  He lay listening to Murdoch’s footsteps as they faded out along the passage outside. When he could no longer hear them, he threw his long legs over the side of the bed and stood up, yawning. “Stone the crows!” he muttered, and the words were like stones dropped into the chilly quietness of the room. He looked round it, made a grimace of distaste, picked up a packet of cigarettes from the table and walked out, locking the door behind him.

  Sunday was a dead day at Riverslake Hostel. The camp was quiet, like a plague-ridden city. The roads and the gravelled paths were deserted, nobody loitered on the stretch of lawn round the office, and the huts were bare and blank, as if nobody had lived in them for years. But Charlesworth, looking at them, could easily picture what went on behind the uncommunicative walls.

  In summer, there was something to do, if only to round up some girls and spend a few hours on the grassy flats beside the Molonglo where it winds round the base of Black Mountain. Some did that, others, who could get a lift, went out to the Cotter River or up to the Murrumbidgee for a swim. But in the cold weather the men of Riverslake hugged their huts, getting up only for meals. They stocked up with wine on Saturday night and spent Sunday in their rooms, drinking and gambling, sprawled on the beds and on the floor in a dense haze of cigarette smoke, as many to a room as could find space. There was nothing else to do.

  Charlesworth knew exactly where he could have sat in on half a dozen different drinking parties without waiting for an invitation, but he wanted something else—what, he didn’t know, but it was not drink or talk or cards or company. He wandered between the huts and out into the clear, where he sat down on a flat rock on the grassy hillside and stared out over the valley.

  What only a week ago had been a thin film of green was now an eve
r-thickening mantle, and everywhere leaves turned and silvered as a light wind flickered amongst them. The willows along the river’s banks, and the clumps and avenues of poplars that studded the floor of the valley were like green flames, and the lucerne flats below the camp, throwing off their winter lethargy, glowed with the greenness of deep seas. Mount Ainslie soared against the blue, the white boles of the gum-trees on its rocky slopes like gleaming match-sticks; the spire of Saint John’s pointed the way to heaven from amongst its trees and gleaming grave-stones. The long black scars of the runways laid immobile shadows across the green expanse of the drome. It was soft and gentle and quiet. The only sound to be heard on Riverslake hillside was the occasional burst of a motor, somewhere, and the soft lowing of cows from the flats below.

  “Bloody pretty,” Charlesworth muttered, softly and savagely. “And bloody dead!” He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stared moodily over the peaceful scene. He had been in Canberra for nearly three years, but would not have stayed there for three months if he had not met a girl and fallen in love with her.

  At first, he had regarded it as one of the swift push-over affairs that had high-lighted the five years since he left his home in Sydney, intent on seeing as much of the country as he might while jobs were plentiful wherever he might go. But she was no pushover, the girl from the florist’s shop in Kingston. The fact kept him interested until he realized sometimes with wonder and sometimes almost with fear, that he loved her and wanted to marry her.

  His girl’s mother did not like him. She was a grey-haired, grey-faced widow whose whole life was centred on her only child. She did not intend that the girl should marry a pot-walloper from a labourers’ camp, and took no pains to disguise her hostility to Charlesworth. He, on his part, was fired to ambition by her opposition, and began to think that perhaps he might improve his chances with her by getting a better job.

  His chance came when one of the stove cooks at the hostel left at a moment’s notice. He got the job and applied himself to the work—he was quick to learn and, when he was interested, was a good worker. The old sweets cook, Hughie Mancin, took a fancy to him and taught him enough to consolidate him in the job, so that before long he was as much a part of the kitchen as the huge iron range. No one ever thought of the place without his ready wise-crack and the short, hard laugh that he made his signature.

  He expected that with his improved prospects his girl’s mother might take a more lenient view of him. He was disappointed. Where once she had openly despised him, and had felt reasonably certain that her daughter would never entertain any idea of doing more than go to dances and the pictures with him until someone better came along, now she feared him. It hardened her resentment against him.

  He had come a long way from the cheeky lair of her first impressions. He had given up drinking, almost, and had bought clothes with the money he had been accustomed to lose at gambling; above all, he had quietened down the loud approach she remembered with such distaste. But he might have saved himself the trouble—all she noticed was that he wore more and more the air of a serious young man with marriage as his goal, and in a city where there were Government officials and even budding diplomats as matrimonial prizes she did not intend her daughter to marry a cook. It gradually changed her dislike of him to hatred, and her fear into something like panic.

  When she had felt more secure against him she had allowed her daughter, grudgingly, to bring him into tea on Sunday evenings. On Sunday night, and sometimes during the week, he had spent uncomfortable hours in her comfortable little sitting-room listening to the wireless and examining photograph albums under her disapproving glance. But when his intention became more obvious, and the change in him more permanent, she forbade him the house and forbade the girl to go out with him or even to see him. When she learned that they had been to dances and the pictures together, or had been standing in the shadow of the big plane-tree in front of her home, she fed on her hatred.

  Charlesworth tolerated her attitude at first—he knew that he was no catch for any woman’s daughter. But after he had made the effort to better himself, and succeeded, he felt that there should be some reward, some let-up in her dislike of him. When it did not come his bitterness matched hers.

  “God, Bet,” he would say desperately, his lips against his girl’s, “how long are we going to go like this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Slim. I can’t do anything about mum!”

  “What’s she got against me now? I know I used to be a bit of a no-hoper, but not now. God, Bet, I haven’t had a drink for days, and do you know how much I’ve got in the bank now?”

  “How much, darling?”

  “Nearly four hundred quid, that’s how much!”

  “Oh, darling!”

  “Well, what the heck’s up with her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know! She doesn’t like you!”

  “I know that much—but what the hell for?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  It was like a gramophone record replayed, the same questions, the same answers; the same desperate suggestions and desperate pleas, every time they met.

  “Don’t, Slim. Don’t, darling! A car might come along!”

  “Ar—don’t don’t! I’m not wood, Bet! Bet, honey, let’s get married and damn them all!”

  “Oh, Slim, I can’t!”

  “She won’t get any better, ever. We’re just wasting our time!”

  “We see plenty of each other, Slim—can’t we wait?”

  “God, do you think I like sneaking around like this, under damn trees, and meeting you down at the pictures instead of calling for you like other blokes call for their girls?”

  “Oh, darling, do you think I like it?”

  “Well, why stand for it? Gee, Bet, we’re not kids! Let’s get married!”

  “I’ll be twenty-one next year, darling. Mum might come round before then. Let’s wait!”

  “Oh, Bet—next year!”

  The same questions and the same answers, spoken at interval outside the picture theatre, between dances outside the dance-hall, dodging the lights of passing cars; whispered on benches in parks, under the plane-tree outside the girl’s home. Spoken before he left her and echoing in his mind as he lay in his bed at Riverslake, unable to sleep because the Pole in the next room was snoring and shouting in his sleep, or because the Maltese across the corridor was having a party in his room with half a dozen of his countrymen, pumping a wheezy accordion and singing the songs of their homeland. Echoing in his head and worrying him until his hatred of the widowed woman almost matched hers for him, and almost made him wonder, at times, if it were worth it.

  Even when I do marry Bet, he thought despairingly, she’ll always be there, the old woman. Damn her!

  “Hey, Slim!”

  Charlesworth turned his head, still full of his bitter thoughts. It was Bellairs, drunk as usual.

  “Hey, Slim, what you doin’ there? You crook?”

  Bellairs swayed towards him, his face red and bloated, his bulbous eyes shot with ragged threads of crimson. He had not shaved for days and his clothes looked as if he had slept in them for a week.

  “You crook, Slim?” he repeated querulously, wagging his head. “C’m’on in an’ have a snort—we got a keg in Jerry’s room. An’ some sheilas. Whew!” He came to an unsteady halt in front of Charlesworth, sagging and blowing like a foundered horse. He looked blearily down on the man sitting on the rock.

  “No, Red. I don’t want any grog today.”

  “What’s a matter? You getting as bad as Kerry—he never wants to play these days!”

  “Kerry’s all right.”

  “Pigs, is he! He’s tailing round with Mister bloody Randolph an’ that flamin’ Balt!”

  “Randolph’s all right, and so’s the Balt.”

  “All right?” Bellairs attempted to spit, but merely dribbled over
the mat of red hair that had been uncovered by his gaping shirt. He looked down at it curiously, and wiped it off with an unsteady finger, rocking on his widely planted feet. He looked like a fairly intelligent chimpanzee, surprised to find itself dressed up. Charlesworth laughed, short and hard, and Bellairs looked up.

  “All right?” he repeated thickly, unaware that there had been a long pause in the conversation. “Tha’s what you think! The bastard’s a spy!”

  “Who—Randolph or the Balt?”

  “The Balt—the one tha’ sconed Jerry that day with the pot.” Bellairs became tipsily confidential. He essayed a glance over one shoulder, swayed perilously, and thought better of it. “Bastard’s a spy. ’S a lot of ’em come in with these Balts. He’s one of ’em.”

  “Oh, bull—how do you know?”

  “I know! We got t’ watch ’em, Slim, or we’ll be out on our necks. C’m’on in an’ have a snort, sport. C’m’on in!”

  “No, I don’t want any grog, I tell you,” Charlesworth insisted. “You don’t want to go round talking like that, either, about people being spies. You might get into trouble.”

  “Who off?”

  “You might find a copper camped on your doorstep one of these days.”

  Bellairs drew himself up with a show of arrogance. “Coppers in Canberra won’ touch me,” he said. “They know better’n to touch me!”

  “Yeah, I can imagine!” Charlesworth stood up. “I’m going in. I’ve got some letters to write.”

  “Who to—your sheila?” Bellairs inquired with lewd coyness.

  “Yes, to my sheila,” Charlesworth replied. He walked away with a mirthless grin.

  He roamed round by the kitchen. There was only a cold tea on Sundays, and none of the cooks stayed on afternoon shift, but he thought he might strike one of them making a cup of tea. In a sunny elbow where the kitchen joined the mess he came upon Paramor sitting on the warm concrete, his short, thick legs stretched out in front of him, his back against the wall. Beside him Novikowsky squatted, his dark, intelligent eyes on the Australian’s face, his big, dark hands hanging limply between his knees. He’s a good-looking bastard, Charlesworth thought, as he walked towards them. Got nous, too—he must’ve been a bit of a doer in his own country.