Riverslake Read online

  “Spin for five,” Murdoch suggested to Novikowsky. “Sydney or the bush!”

  “Sydney———?”

  Murdoch whipped one of the blue notes out of the Pole’s hand. He tossed it across to the ring-keeper. “Five,” he said. “He don’t know.”

  The ring-keeper looked at the five-pound note in his hand. He smiled a tight smile.

  “He soon will!” he said.

  Novikowsky stood in the middle of the bare patch of red dirt, still as a rock while the ring-keeper’s mate put the pennies onto the kip. A couple of late betters called their bets and were set; silence settled over the ring except for the hissing of the lamps. He looked at the two tiers of palely luminous faces that surrounded him, and remembered without volition the tale his father used to tell him, as a child, of two hunters in the black woods of Poland, standing back to back in a circle of grinning wolves. The same thin tingle that had etched his back then etched it now.

  “This’s where you begin your flamin’ lesson, Baltie!” one of the onlookers called out.

  Novikowsky grinned and shrugged.

  “Some time must begin—maybe, pay for learn!”

  “You ain’t kiddin’!” the ring-keeper’s mate observed, out of his vast experience. He stepped back from Novikowsky. “You all right, mate? All set on the side, gents? All right, then—come in, spinner!”

  The two rows of faces, Murdoch’s amongst them, lifted and dropped again. Novikowsky headed them, and no mistake. Two lovely pictures of Victoria looking up at them from the red dust.

  “Heads are right!” the ring-keeper’s mate intoned.

  The player next to Murdoch laid two pound notes on the ground in front of him, took two more from his pocket, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, sure!” Murdoch answered his unspoken demand. “Double up, and more if you want it?”

  The man shrugged a refusal, so Murdoch set a better on the other side of the ring. He had that queer, untraceable conviction that Novikowsky was set for a trot of heads; it started somewhere in his belly and seeped down to the very tips of his itching fingers. The middle was set again in no time, and they were away again. Heads. And then again. The tail betters began to fade out.

  “You want to drag, digger?” the ring-keeper asked Novikowsky. “You’ve got thirty-five.”

  He had run rings in a hundred different camps, and he knew that the only man that ever won was the ring-keeper. He was not afraid that they would ever wake up to it—some might, and start games of their own, but not the poor dopes who came back week after week to buy the fruit for his sideboard.

  He had seen men mad with excitement, but hiding it with a soft smile and a lifted eyebrow; he had seen men bitter over losses and letting everybody know about it. He had dealt with men avaricious, men spiteful, and men desperate, but no one had ever got under his skin for more than the flash of a moment. He never spoke in any but a soft, slow voice, nor looked at them in any way but a mild, amused indifference … as he did now at Novikowsky.

  “It’s your dough, digger,” he advised the Pole. Take your dough, pass the kip, go home and never come near another ring. But of course, you won’t. No, I thought not.

  Novikowsky shook his head, and the ring-keeper looked away from his serious face to the mob round the ring.

  “We want thirty-five, gents. Get the guts set, before you bet on the side. He’s a good spinner—don’t let him die in the hole. Any part of thirty-five?”

  There was still a lot of money round the ring, though it was some time to pay-day. He got the middle set with three tens and a five. A big man standing in the second row back from the ring threw the three tens, rolled into a ball, at his feet.

  “I’ll take thirty of it,” he announced sneeringly, looking at Novikowsky as though the Pole were butterflying the pennies. “This ape can’t keep going for ever. It’s a bad show when it’s left to a Balt to skin the blasted ring!”

  When Murdoch heard the voice, he looked up sharply, straining to see the speaker in the glaring light. It was Bellairs. A few of the players laughed, but Novikowsky went red as a beetroot. The ring-keeper merely looked at Bellairs, extended a foot and pushed the notes through the red dust.

  “Beat it, Bellairs,” he commanded, softly. “You’ve had your time, here.”

  “Who’ll make me beat it?” Bellairs asked with an ugly sneer.

  “I will.”

  “You’ll———”

  The ring-keeper’s hand moved so fast that it almost crammed the foul word back between the lips that had spoken it.

  “Watch the box, Sid,” he said to his mate. He stood over Bellairs while he scrambled to his feet, blood pouring over the front of his filthy shirt. “The Balt’s dough’s as good as yours, Bellairs. If you can’t do yours without screaming about it, then best leave it at home, and stay with it. Now beat it, and don’t come back, ever.”

  Bellairs stared at him sullenly for a moment. Then he swung round and shouldered his way through the spectators, who fell back to let him through. Murdoch, watching him, did not blame him—the hand at the end of the ring-keeper’s arm was as big as a small pumpkin, and shaped much the same.

  “Right-oh, gents, let ’er flicker—we want thirty!”

  The game swung on again, immediately, as though nothing had happened. Most of the men round the ring were hardened to anything that might happen, and a lot of them had figured time and time again in similar occurrences. The middle was set, and Novikowsky spun. Heads. And then again. The ring-keeper began to have trouble in getting the stake covered. The tail-betters had folded.

  “All right, gents,” he called out, “there’s one hundred and forty quid in the guts—get it set before you bet on the side. He’s a game spinner. Any part of one-forty quid—I’ll take it in singles.” He grinned, knowing that the market had closed up. “I’ll take it in deeners!”

  There was no response, so he turned to Novikowsky.

  “You’d better drag, digger. We’re wasting time.”

  Novikowsky nodded, not quite understanding what he had said. As the ring-keeper counted his money into his hand, he stood looking at it, not sure what to do, not even realizing properly that his spin was over.

  “Snatch it, Stefan,” Murdoch said from the side of the ring. “Come on out—your spin’s finished. Hand ’em the kip!”

  Novikowsky shrugged and walked out of the ring.

  “Sling, Stefan!” When the Pole looked at him uncomprehendingly Murdoch whipped a ten-pound note out of the bundle and handed it to the ring-keeper. “He don’t know,” he explained. “It’s the first time he’s played.”

  “Then for Gawd’s sakes, make it his last!” The little man who had taken Novikowsky’s first bet spoke ruefully, but there was no spite in his words. “What he’s done to me ain’t nobody’s business!

  The ring-keeper tossed the ten-pound note negligently into the box. “Thanks, digger,” he said.

  Novikowsky’s trot had broken a lot. Figures began to drift away from the game. Torches bobbed back along the track to the hostel, and muttered curses reached those round the ring as men stumbled on the rough track. Murdoch, looking up suddenly, followed the beam of a torch that stabbed in amongst the low-hanging branches of a gum-tree fifty yards away from the ring. Three men crouched in the shadow of the tree, livened for a moment by the yellow beam; one of them, he was certain, was Bellairs. If it were, the others would be a couple of his cronies, and they would be waiting there for only one thing—for the biggest winner to leave the ring. Murdoch shrugged. It was something that they would have to take care of when the necessity arose.

  Novikowsky began to back the tails, on his own initiative. It was a good hunch—after a few losing bets, the tails began to rain down, and it looked as if the pennies had been minted without heads. So much so that the head-betters who had survived on his run of heads now tumbled to the ru
n of tails, and before long the game began to peak. Murdoch, who was holding Novikowsky’s money for him, threw another five-pound note to the ring-keeper and nodded to the Pole.

  “Come on, Stefan, we’ll go home.”

  “Not much use you stopping, anyway,” the ring-keeper observed, without sarcasm. It just was not any use their stopping any longer; they had won most of the money round the ring, and had waited a fair while to give the losers a chance to win it back. “You be O.K., you think?”

  His eyes flickered out from the lighted ring and along the shadowy track. He too, apparently, was thinking of Bellairs.

  “Hell, yes, she’s apples,” Murdoch said casually, with a nonchalance he was far from feeling. He nodded to Novikowsky. “Come on, Stefan.”

  They left the glow of the ring behind them, and the subdued murmur of the few remaining betters melted into the darkness and the silence. Passing the tree where for a brief moment he had seen the three figures silhouetted in the swift beam of a torch, Murdoch glanced sideways but could see nothing. They had not gone more than a few yards farther on, stumbling on the uneven surface of the track, when a stone, dislodged in the darkness, clattered a few feet down the slope and came to rest.

  “Come on!” He grasped Novikowsky by the arm. “Run! Run like hell!” As they began to pound along the gully, the clatter of footsteps behind them joined in the noise of their own flight.

  They reached the first of the darkened huts, dodged down between it and the one next to it; reaching the far end, Murdoch stopped sharply. Followed by Novikowsky, he tiptoed up the steps, along the central passage and through the far door. There they stopped, listened for a moment above the rasping of their hearts, and then darted across to the hut opposite. They ran softly through it and out the other end into the low gum-tree scrub that crept right up to the edge of the hostel.

  “Wait a mo’,” Murdoch panted. Again they stopped and listened. All the noises of the camp drifted out to them, but of sounds of pursuit there were none. They had apparently shaken off whoever had left the game just behind them.

  “What is this, then?” Novikowsky whispered, the first words he had spoken since they quitted the ring. “What is this running?” He could only vaguely make out his companion’s outline, and the doubling, twisting chase had lost him completely. “It is like when it was the Resistance, now! I remember …”

  “Come on,” Murdoch interrupted him shortly. “We’ll talk when we get back to Riverslake—if we get there in one piece. Some of those animals thought they’d pick us off, I reckon. That big ape that had a go at you, Stefan—Bellairs, from the camp. They mightn’t have, but it’s just as well to be on the safe side!”

  “Pick us off?” Novikowsky repeated the unfamiliar phrase. “What is it, this pick us off?”

  Murdoch made no answer. He was already edging through the scrub away from the hostel. Novikowsky looked behind him at the darkened buildings. He listened to and felt the cool wind that rustled in the leaves around him and tickled the long dark hair that fell across his forehead. This dark, almost-warm Australian night sent a shiver down his spine; the stars, so near and bright, were strange stars, and the lights of the city, scattered in festoons beneath the looming shadow of Black Mountain on the other side of the valley, were only the pale reflection of those stars in the black heart of a sea of tremendous distances and inconceivable isolation.

  It was all so big—big with bigness that frightened him and made him long suddenly for the tight neighbourliness of the Polish countryside, the small fields and the stone’s throw between houses, the hour’s walk between villages. And for the people he would understand, and who would understand him—not these Australians, hard and big and incomprehensible like their country, who could begrudge him the money he had won at a game where they all might have won as much if it had been their luck to do so. He shivered, sensing the affinity of hardness between this country and its people, an affinity so close that he might blunt his years in trying to force his way into it.

  He shrugged and plunged in amongst the trees in pursuit of Murdoch, whose passage was marked for him by the swaying of branches and the clatter of small stones in the darkness.

  Hanrahan walked in from the kitchen, wiping his hands fastidiously on a large white handkerchief. He stopped for a moment in the doorway of the sitting-room, and settled the fit of his pale-grey trousers round his plump waist.

  “Do you want to go home, Blackie, or wait here?”

  “You stopping?” the driver demanded.

  “Yes, for a while. But if you want to go, that’s O.K. It’s a nice night, and not far to walk back to the Kurrajong.”

  Randolph smiled to himself. The old boy never missed a chance to impress the fact, even with people who knew it and had known it for years, that he lived at the Hotel Kurrajong. As if, having accomplished the feat of rags to riches, he still felt slightly insecure against the ghost of his battling past, and sought, not to impress others with his present status, but to assure himself that he really held it. That he, Jimmy Hanrahan, so many struggling years ago of a little timber town in Gippsland, now lived in the same hotel as the Prime Minister, and spoke to him every morning at breakfast, calling him by his Christian name.

  “I’m easy, J.H.,” the driver shrugged. “Are you going to be late?

  “No, not very.”

  “So long as you’re not, I’ll wait in the car and have a bit of a snooze. You should, too, after last night!”

  “H’m, yes—last night!” Hanrahan muttered reminiscently. “I am a bit tired.” He flopped into a chair, carefully re-arranging the crease of his trousers once he was settled in.

  “Then you shouldn’t have insisted on drying up, darling,” Linda Spain chipped him. “Ran could have done it, or Roddy.”

  “Could I, hell!” Fildes snorted abruptly from behind her. “I never did it in the Raaf, and I’m not starting now, not even for you!” He was prowling round the room peering at the watercolours on the walls. There was only one light on, the big standard in one corner, and he had his nose almost against the glass. “If Silver wants to make a slushy of himself, that’s up to him!”

  Immediately after dinner Hanrahan had insisted resolutely on accompanying Linda Spain into the kitchen to help with the dishes. Randolph was amused—the simple touch, the elder statesman mingling with the common herd. See, even I can do the dishes.

  But as well as being amused, he was grateful that Hanrahan had monopolized the job. He knew that if Linda had had her way he and not Hanrahan would have been out in the kitchen with a tea-towel tucked round his middle. And she would have tucked it in.

  Randolph felt like a man who, wanting to swim, plunges into a stream and finds that although the water is warm the current is too strong. He knew that he was being carried away in his affair with Paul Spain’s wife, and still made futile efforts to get out. He knew they were futile, because he only half wanted to escape. Drowning can be a pleasant death.

  As often as he could he avoided Linda Spain, or at least avoided the opportunities she engineered to throw them together alone. He had no doubt what the ultimate outcome would be, and he had no doubt that unless something happened to stop it, the ultimate would soon be reached. Only Paul Spain stopped it—not by what he did or said, but by doing and saying nothing. His enigmatical reserve kept Randolph guessing.

  If only it were not Paul’s wife, Randolph said to himself a hundred times. If only it were someone who would try to hurt back. But not Paul.

  “Stay, Blackie.” Linda Spain broke into Randolph’s thoughts from the depths of the large lounge where she had curled beside him, her legs tucked beneath her. Paul Spain was sitting in a deep chair on the other side of the fire-place, where a token fire sputtered amongst a mound of white ashes. “It won’t be late. Silver’s tired, and so are we. Only a bit of a chat and a couple of drinks—we haven’t got more than three or four bottles, I think. It
won’t kill you.”

  “No thanks, Mrs Spain.” The driver looked at her with the impersonal dislike that even in Paul’s presence he was unable totally to conceal. You slick bitch, he thought, if it wasn’t for Paul, and that I’ve got to bring Silver here, I’d never set foot in this house. “No thanks, I’ve had enough for today. I’ll wait in the car, like I said, and have a snooze. Good night, Mr Randolph. Good night, Mr Spain.” There was more warmth in his voice as he spoke to Spain, but only the woman noticed it. He ignored Fildes. “Don’t be too long, J.H.”

  “No, not long.”

  The front door clicked behind him, and the raggedy little dog that had accompanied him so far returned and curled up beside Spain’s feet. His hand dropped to it and tickled its ear absently.

  “Old Blackie!” he said, with a short laugh. “Quite a character, isn’t he?”

  “Quite,” his wife replied, with a touch of malice. “Quite a character. One I can take or leave, to be quite candid.”

  “You’re such a kid, Linda.” Spain threw her an amused smile. “If Blackie liked you, you’d think he was the best bloke in the world, wouldn’t you?”

  “Blackie’s all right,” Hanrahan interposed. “Salt of the earth.”

  “Hell, yes,” Fildes said from the darkness behind him. He was standing in front of a cabinet where Linda Spain kept her collection of little china animals, fingering them and stroking their glowing lustre. “He’s one of the new aristocracy. No education, no people, no background, but he can call a Member of Parliament by his Christian name and tell him not to be too long!”

  “Sit down, for heaven’s sake, Roddy!” Linda Spain said over her shoulder. “You give me the willies, prowling round like a caged lion!”

  Fildes moved into the circle of light and stared down at her.