Riverslake Read online

  When Paul married he settled into a house slightly smaller than his old home and only a few streets away from it; in his whole life he had never spoken to a man like the one now sitting beside him, never consciously been as close to one as he was now.

  His eyes slid away from the window for another survey, but dropped quickly. His neighbour’s eyes, china-blue and radiating thin red lines from the irises, were open, and staring arrogantly round the bus. They settled, and Spain, following the direction of their gaze with his own, became aware of the conversation of the men in the seat directly in front of him.

  “Education must count,” one of them was saying in a well-modulated voice, with long and rounded vowels. “Education and training. Yet what happens? We spend years at school and the university studying our flaming heads off. Then we get jobs as offsiders to a lot of yahoos who can’t even speak the king’s English!” He dragged deeply on his cigarette, and let the smoke trickle through his nostrils, grinning sourly. “My God, you should see some of the bilge my bloke dishes up to me—if I let it go as he gives it to me, Hansard would read like Ginger Meggs!”

  “Well, what are you going to do? Give it up and swing a pick?”

  The second man’s voice was identical with the first; the slang they used was in invisible inverted commas. Spain recognized him as the other of the two men who had been standing close to him at the bus-stop.

  “We’d make more if we did!” the first exclaimed. “And work less hours to get it, too! They don’t want men who think, now. They want blasted ignoramuses!”

  “What do you expect, with an ex-engine-driver as P.M. and a flock of ex-union-secretaries as Ministers?” His companion laughed shortly and looked round at the people on the seats nearest him. “I think I’ll join the Ironworkers’ Union and make sure of my career!”

  Some of the passengers laughed, but it was cut short. The man next to Spain leaned forward.

  “You couldn’t get in!” He shot the words between the two heads in front. He hawked disgustingly and spat on the floor between his feet. “They want men in the unions, not poofters!”

  His voice, coarsened with beer and loud with arrogance, bounced from one end of the bus to the other. Passengers stopped talking and looked up from their evening papers.

  The two men in front started. Both turned round, shocked amazement on their faces. In their code, opinions might be aired on a bus, but not differences of opinion. That was kept for privacy.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, fella,” one of them said coldly.

  “But I was talking to you, fella!” The big man mimicked him, with an ugly grin. “When are you bunnies going to wake up that you’ve had the stick? You been running this joint long enough with your French and your bloody algebra. Now it’s our turn!”

  “See how you go when you’re game enough to face an election?”

  Why the hell doesn’t he shut up? Spain thought. This bloke’s drunk—he’ll start something in a minute.

  “We’re in now, and we’ll still be in fifty years from now,” the man next to him sneered. “And you’ll still be licking stamps for the blokes we put in!”

  Some of the passengers farther along the bus laughed, and some turned round and stared coldly at the cause of the disturbance. An elderly man rustled his paper angrily and muttered, “Talk sense! And if you can’t, keep your voices down!”

  It nettled the labourer.

  “Yes, talk sense!” he almost shouted. “I’ll talk sense, all right, and a damned sight more sense than you!” He stopped and looked belligerently at the two men in front of him. “You were right, all right, about what you said, you poor dopes. You go to the best schools, all right, and you study for years, and then finish up licking stamps for a tenner a week, and damned lucky to get it. It’s all you’re worth, licking stamps.” He sneered and tapped his bulging chest. “Me, I never went to no university, I never went to school only when my old woman was behind me with her boot. But I drag down twice as much as both you mugs put together. I don’t go short of nothing, grog or sheilas or nothing, and no sheila that shacks up with me don’t go short of nothing, neither. What’s your wives get out of your tenner a week, eh?”

  He slewed suddenly, and glared at Spain, who had been sitting stiff with embarrassment, staring at the floor between his feet. He was embarrassed in a way he had never experienced before, embarrassed for himself and for his class and for anybody in the bus, whether he knew them or not, who was feeling the way he was. He felt the red mount into an agonizing flood in his fair face.

  “What about you, dig?” the big man demanded, pushing his face so close that the foulness of his breath gushed sickeningly across Spain’s nostrils. “You look like a good white-collar job, tenner a week and kiss the boss’s tate. How’s your missus get along—for the things you got to buy, I mean?”

  His voice dropped to an insinuating leer, and the meaning of his last few words was unmistakable.

  Spain looked at him for a moment, hardly comprehending. His thoughts in a confused whirl, he got to his feet and stood looking down. It was a new situation, one he had never coped with before and one that he had never imagined he might be embroiled in. He just didn’t know what to do. He had a vague idea that he should hit the man, but he was still sitting down. Besides, everybody in the bus would be watching; he looked quickly round and felt the agony of his embarrassment clothe him again. The conductor brushed past him.

  “All right, mate,” he said brusquely to the big man. “That’ll do, or get off the bus.”

  The other looked up at him, slowly and coldly. “My name’s Bellairs,” he said thickly, “and you can go and get——!”

  The foul word ripped through the bus. A deadly silence settled behind it. The conductor reached up and pulled the cord.

  “Shut up, you dirty swine!” Spain cried involuntarily, his skin crinkling with horror. “There’s ladies in the bus!”

  “Is there?” Bellairs lurched to his feet as the bus stopped. He glanced insultingly up and down the aisle. “Then they can get, too!”

  Spain swung an ineffectual punch at him; he swayed to one side, grabbed Spain by the front of his coat and shoved him roughly backwards so that he fell across the laps of two girls who were sitting behind him.

  “I wouldn’t hit you, you poor mug!” he said scathingly. “You’d fall to pieces!”

  “Get out!” the conductor ordered shortly.

  Bellairs clumped down to the footpath and turned. “This is my stop, anyhow,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll remember you, mate. You’ll keep!”

  “Tell that to the police!”

  “The coppers around here know better’n to touch me!”

  The conductor pulled the cord. As the bus began to move off, Bellairs grabbed the hand-rail on either side of the door and thrust his face inside the bus. As it gathered pace, he trundled clumsily alongside it, shouting above the growing noise of the engine.

  “Don’t forget, you mugs, you’ve had the stick. It’s our turn now!” His voice rose to a cracked shout. “Up, the Red Flag!”

  He dropped off, and the bus thundered away from him, a diminishing island of light and noise in the vast stillness of the night. The darkness enfolded him, and he stood with his strong legs apart, glaring back at its menace.

  “The bastards!” he muttered. “Call themselves Australians, the bastards!”

  The black bulk of the Hotel Wellington loomed dimly behind him, with a pale glow in the window of the lounge. He turned round and lumbered unsteadily towards it.

  The little terrier trotted along the hallway, its claws making no sound on the deep pile of the carpet. It peered into the lighted room, whined and wriggled, and sat down facing the door, which was closed against the cold. It whined again, impatiently.

  The woman standing beside the fire, one white hand draped along the low mantel and the ot
her holding a glass of red wine against her breast, laughed softly and looked round at the other people in the room.

  “Waiting for Paul,” she explained, and raised her voice to an affectionate coo. “Is it waiting for its father?”

  “Hell!” Randolph said to Murdoch, who sat beside him on the deep lounge. “How long does this go on for?”

  They had been sitting in the dimly lit, tastefully furnished drawing-room of Linda Spain’s home for the best part of an hour. The talk had been light and patchy, something to occupy the lips between drinks. Linda Spain had not paid any attention to Randolph other than to talk to him for a while when Murdoch introduced him. There had been some half-hearted attempts at dancing on the thick rug, but gradually the party drew into little cliques to talk softly and intimately. Only Linda Spain, dark and plump and nakedly attractive, continued to move about the room—from group to group, never stopping more than a couple of minutes, laughing and gossiping, always with the glass of port held against her breast. Half a dozen times, Randolph, glancing up suddenly, met her heavy-lidded glance. It tangled each time with his own and with his emotions for a moment, then slid away.

  A few moments ago she had come to a halt in front of the fire, and remained there draped, as Randolph noticed, for the best effect, along the mantel-piece. There were two other couples sprawled on the carpet to the left of the fire-place, another couple on a chair, the woman seated and the man hunched on the arm. By the door, half in shadow, a short, dark man sat by himself and soaked beer steadily from a big silver tankard. The strains of dance music, soft and sensuous, whispered from a radio somewhere in the room, and cigarette smoke coiled thick and rope-like in the glow of a big standard lamp that stood in one corner. It was the only illumination other than the fire.

  Murdoch laughed, and looked up at the woman by the fire-place. “Where is Paul, Linda?” he demanded.

  “Ask his boss,” she shrugged. “Where is he, Silver?”

  The man sitting on the arm of the chair looked up. He was middle-aged, softly plump, and more than carefully groomed. One thin leg was crossed over the arm of the chair, and its shoe gleamed glossily black in the dull light. He looked at it and shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice thin and nasal. He had succeeded, almost, in ironing his origin out of his appearance, but never from his voice. “At the House, I suppose.” He peered at his watch. “Half past eight, eh? He takes things too seriously.”

  “Someone’s got to do the work,” Murdoch said, only half-jokingly.

  “Not Mr Hanrahan, though,” one of the men lying on the floor said sarcastically. “He’s there to look at.”

  “And if Mr Hanrahan doesn’t do it, then Paul does,” Murdoch said tersely. “So he sits here and goes for the grog while Paul stays at the House and keeps him on Easy Street.”

  There was the same thread of venom in their talk that had coloured most of the conversation during the evening. Randolph glanced idly at the woman by the fire-place. She was looking from Murdoch to Hanrahan with an amused gleam in her eyes.

  “You’ll dig deep for his conscience, Kerry,” she said. “He ditched it about the time of the Eureka Stockade.”

  “It’s an excellent arrangement, as far as I’m concerned,” the man called Hanrahan said smoothly, running one hand over his abundant, silver hair. The woman in the chair beside him giggled tipsily. She was a frizzy blonde, plump and untidy-looking, who had been sipping vacantly at a glass of wine all the evening. Hanrahan shushed her.

  “Linda, honey,” he said, holding out his glass, “hit me.” He looked roguishly at Randolph. “As soon as a new face comes along, she forgets her old friends.”

  Linda Spain pouted at him, and picked up a bottle. “Still on the gin?” She sauntered across the carpet, filled Hanrahan’s glass, and turned to Randolph.

  Looking up at her from the lounge, he saw her face over the provocative twin cups of her breasts; she wore a tight-fitting woollen frock that clung to the valley between them and to the perceptible bulge of her stomach and thighs. Her dark eyes were heavy-lidded in troughs of shadow that she tried to disguise with powder; they looked down at him lazily, and her damp red lips fell apart from her white teeth.

  “Mr Randolph?” she invited. It was a different voice to that which she had used when speaking to Hanrahan, deeper and softer. By hell, Randolph thought, whatever else she is, she isn’t subtle about it.

  “I’m drinking beer, thanks, Mrs Spain,” he said, “but let me get it.”

  “Linda,” she corrected him, smiling.

  “Linda, then,” Randolph grinned. “Let me get it, Linda?”

  “I’ll come with you—it’s in the fridge.”

  He held out his hand and her fingers closed round it, helping him to his feet. She did not let go of it, but held it as they walked across to the door. He felt slightly embarrassed, acutely conscious of the regard of nearly everybody in the room. He flushed as the dark man by the door lowered his tankard and bent a calculating glance on them.

  It was cold in the kitchen. Everything was green and cream, nice for the summer, but comfortless now. Randolph thought by contrast of the kitchen of his childhood home, big and dark and warm, with a glowing wood range and always the smell of cooking, even between meals. Not like this place, which, if it had any smell at all, smelt only of cleanliness. With the aseptic gleam of glass and china and silverware, it looked more like an operating theatre than a kitchen.

  He opened the refrigerator and recoiled from the breath of chillier air that hit him.

  “By God, it’s cold!” he complained. “Let’s get the beer and race back to the fire. Where is it?”

  “At the back.” Linda Spain stooped beside him, and the warmth of her and the scent of the perfume she wore wrapped him as though in a blanket. She was reaching in the refrigerator, moving tins and jars of food. Her shoulder rubbed against his, and her hand touched his as they reached for the same bottle. Her hair, dark and naturally wavy, and lustrous with cleanliness, fell across her shoulder, just in front of his face. He touched it lightly, and drew his hand back, as if he had touched fire.

  “Lovely hair,” he said softly, feeling strangely out of breath. “You’ve lovely hair, Linda.”

  She flashed him a smile, sideways. “It’s the gipsy coming out in me!” she whispered. He laughed.

  “Gipsy! You’re no more a gipsy than I’m a Chinaman!”

  “No, truly!” She seemed half serious, and he was unable to tell if she were joking or not. She retrieved one bottle and stooped for another. “I’ve always thought there must have been a gipsy somewhere—a long while ago, maybe, but there. And I got it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She half straightened up, and twisted to face him, her mouth on a level with his, her eyelids drooping. “I’m different to the others in the family. Always wanting to go places and do things. Colour and music and dancing. And this.” She leaned forward, and laid her lips gently against his, closing her eyes. Randolph had been waiting for it, almost expecting it, but it still took his breath. He stood quite motionless, her lips fluttering against his, staring at her darkened lids. She opened her eyes, and he stared into them.

  “Like that?” she whispered.

  Some of her fire trickled into him. “I like the hors d’oeuvre,” he answered huskily, the words stepping from his own lips to hers. “What about the entrée?”

  “Ask the cook,” she whispered.

  “May I, cook?”

  “Help yourself—there’s sweets to follow.”

  She closed her eyes again as he pressed his mouth harder against hers. He grasped her arms in his hard hands, she leaned her breast against him.

  “Hey!” They jerked apart as a voice rocketed out into the kitchen. Randolph cursed softly. It was Hanrahan. “What are you two doing out there—brewing the blooming beer?”

&nbs
p; “Quiet, Silver. Quiet!” Linda Spain admonished him, at the same time catching Randolph’s eyes and tapping her lips significantly. She herself was quite unperturbed, running one white hand quickly over her hair, wriggling and tugging at her dress with the other.

  Randolph dragged a handkerchief roughly across his lips, feeling cold resentment for Hanrahan surge through him. He stared at the smear of scarlet for a moment, looked inquiringly at the bottles and nodded at the door.

  “Coming in?”

  She shook her head. She took one of his hands, looked at it back and front, kissed it and pressed it against her breast. Randolph felt the thudding of her heart.

  “Not for a moment,” she whispered. “It’d look as if we were disturbed!”

  “Heaven forbid!” he grinned, casting his eyes upwards piously. She laughed delightedly, squeezing the hand she held.

  “You dope,” she whispered, tenderly.

  Looking at her, Randolph sensed a curious change in her. A moment before, she had been just a hot sort on the make, playing an old game with practised ease; now she was any young girl in love—even, it seemed incongruously, in love for the first time.

  “Come on,” she said, with intimate gaiety, “We’ll go in now. You bring the bottles, Bob.”

  Paul Spain stopped outside his home and looked at the rear of the car parked in the drive. A Commonwealth car—he did not need to look at the number plate to see whose it would be. Hanrahan’s.

  “That oaf!” he muttered. “Always at the damned place!” The big silky-oak by the gate muttered and sighed in the wind. He looked up into its branches. “Why the hell can’t he keep away?” he demanded of the darkness there. “Why the hell———?”

  He buried his face in both his hands and stood swaying beneath the swaying tree, Hanrahan forgotten.

  He lived again the scene on the bus, picking himself up from the laps of the two girls, the incoherent apologies and the agony of shame; the misery of looking out at the trees racing by yet seeing reflected in the glass the covert glances of the other people in the bus; the almost insuperable effort of making himself stand up, when it came to his stop, and of walking the length of the aisle to the door. The realization that tomorrow everyone at the House would know about it and, although they wouldn’t say anything to him, would discuss it—and he would know that they were discussing it, and they would know that he knew.