Riverslake Read online

  He groaned aloud. The sound seemed to drag away the hard core of despair and revulsion that had lodged like a dob of wet clay inside his chest. He stood erect, straightened his tie and hat, and pushed open his front gate.

  If I had any guts, he thought bitterly, I’d tell Hanrahan to go to hell out of my house and keep away from Linda. Tell him to get back to the House and attend to the business of the people who put him there. He grinned mirthlessly. The people who put him there! If Hanrahan’s party had put up a ten-day corpse, it would have romped home with a comfortable majority, but the old shyster acted like an elder statesman, with his lovely white hair and his fifty-guinea suits. And his pat on the bottom for the little typists at the House. If I had any guts———!

  As he turned the key in the door, a shaggy little bundle hurtled along the hall. He knelt, and the dog launched itself against his chest, straining avidly to lick his face and wriggling in his arms like a tin of worms. A comforting warmth stole into his chest.

  “Is that you, Paul, darling?”

  It was his wife’s voice, drifting out of the drawing-room on a beam of subdued light and cigarette smoke. There was a soft murmur of voices, too.

  “Yes, dear.”

  More damned people. What ratbags this time? He walked along the hall and into the drawing-room. For God’s sake, he thought, I only know three of them! He nodded to the woman in the chair alongside Hanrahan.

  “Good evening, Mrs Raper. Hullo, J.H.—evening off?”

  Hanrahan nodded.

  “Kiss, dear.” Linda held up her face to him, and he bent and brushed her lips with his own.

  “Darling,” he murmured softly.

  She manoeuvred her face gently from under his.

  “Meet some people, Paul,” she said. “I thought you’d like some company if you could get away from that awful place early enough.

  She put her hands on his hips and turned him round like a mechanical figure. The crew on the floor did not get up to acknowledge the introduction. They nodded and grinned at him from where they lay.

  “Kerry you know, darling—and this is Mr Randolph. My husband, Paul.”

  “How do you do?” Randolph stood up to take Spain’s hand. Not a bad sort of a codger—with a swift glance, he took in the slight, almost boyish figure, the pale face and the shy eyes. He felt suddenly again, and flushed for it, the touch of this man’s wife’s lips against his own.

  “Well, thanks,” Spain replied conventionally to his conventional greeting. He looked at Randolph. Dark, skinny, disturbingly masculine. Black eyes, full mouth. This would be the next, now that Murdoch had dropped out. “Welcome to the house. Working in Canberra?”

  “Thanks. Yes—at Riverslake, cooking.”

  “Oh.” Spain was suddenly struck with the incongruity of the situation. Of himself standing there making conversation with the man who would in all probability be his wife’s lover inside a week, or a month at the outside, and of doing it under the regard of one, or perhaps two or more, of her former lovers. He had never been quite sure how far Hanrahan had got.

  And yet, he thought, I like this bloke. God, I must be a gutless bastard! I like him, knowing what he’s after—even if he wasn’t after it when he came here, he is now. Perhaps I don’t deserve to hold her—if I ever did hold her at all.

  He turned to the dark man sitting by the door.

  “How are you, Blackie?” he asked, with real warmth in his voice. “Having a night off?”

  “Nuh.” The dark man nodded to Hanrahan. “Driving J.H. How’re you, Mr Spain?” His dark little eyes searched the other’s face almost anxiously. Randolph, watching Linda Spain, saw an enigmatic little smile chase across her lips without ever getting anywhere near her eyes.

  “I’m O.K., Blackie.” Spain laughed. “Never been better. Don’t you work too hard tonight. Got a beer?”

  The dark man tilted his tankard, squinted into it and nodded. “My pay goes on, Mr Spain,” he said, with a shrug. “I’m on overtime, too. Easiest way I ever knew of making dough.”

  Hanrahan broke into their conversation.

  “How’s things at the House, Paul—anything on when you left?” The House, the House! Randolph thought derisively. They speak about it as though it were the throne of God almighty! He bent his glance, half hostile, half amused, on the little politician. Murdoch’s glance followed Randolph’s. He didn’t like Hanrahan; he liked no politicians, least of all this one with his smooth detachment, his beautifully cut clothes and his sticky record.

  “Everything stops when Silver leaves,” he said maliciously. “Doesn’t it, Paul?”

  Spain laughed. “No, nothing much, Silver,” he said, answering Hanrahan’s query.

  “You wouldn’t be missed if there was, Silver,” Murdoch said with spiteful humour. “Calm yourself. If Chif gets stuck, he’ll send for you—you leave a number when you go out, don’t you?”

  A flush spread into Hanrahan’s cheeks. He liked Murdoch about as much as Murdoch liked him, and the boy’s shafts rarely failed to sting him. More intelligent men he could reduce to crestfallen silence, for he had spent a lifetime learning how to do it, but whatever retorts he made seemed to glance off the tough armour of Murdoch’s ignorance.

  “I pick my time to leave the chamber,” he replied tartly. “I’ve had thirty years’ experience, after all.”

  “The biggest aspidistra in the world!” Murdoch mocked.

  The conversation bogged down into an uncomfortable silence. The group on the floor, once the introduction to Spain was completed, had become immersed again in their whispered confidences; the blonde in the chair sipped pensively at her drink, belched delicately and stared owlishly into the glowing caverns of the fire. Linda Spain’s glance was fixed on her husband’s broad, thin shoulders.

  “Riverslake, eh?” Spain said at length, looking at Randolph. “Then you’d know all about the Balts. How are they settling in, do you think?”

  Randolph shook his head.

  “Not me,” he admitted. “I only started there today. From other places I’ve been, though, I’d say not too well. But I don’t know about Riverslake—Kerry’d know.” He turned to Murdoch with raised eyebrows. “How, Kerry?”

  Murdoch shrugged. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said. Randolph grinned. It came so pat, and the shrug that accompanied it. “Some settle in, some don’t. Half our fault, half theirs. Not much we can do about it, I guess.”

  “Well, guess again,” Spain advised him grimly. Randolph’s eyes swung to his face. “We’ve got to make a success of it, if we ever had to do anything. Even if we have to—well, I don’t know what we might have to do. Maybe we’ve got to get down off our high horse a bit, and meet them half-way. But whatever we do about it, we’ve got to make a success of the immigration policy.”

  “We will make a success of it,” Hanrahan intoned. His voice was slightly more deeply pitched, unctuous and pedantic. It was his disguise as a parliamentarian. “We in the Government have our finger right on the pulse of the whole problem. We have allotted the best brains and the most far-reaching———”

  “Keep it for the House, Silver,” Murdoch interrupted him. “What’s something good for next Saturday? That’s something you really know a bit about.”

  He spoke as though he were equal in age and station with Hanrahan, and Randolph was unable to repress a grin for the ease with which it stopped the old gasbag in his stride. Even Hanrahan had to essay a tight little laugh with the rest of them, but he made no comment. He had tangled with Murdoch before.

  “I’d like to talk to you some time about it, Spain,” Randolph volunteered. “I’m interested.”

  “Sure.” Spain looked at him speculatively. I’m a gutless wonder all right, he thought. I do like this bloke—he’s got a damned sight more to him than most of them have had. “Sure,” he repeated, “come round some night. You see one end o
f it, the end that counts most, I expect. I only see the decisions made.” He grinned shyly. “I don’t mean that I’m the Minister’s right-hand man. I just see them racing round with their bits of paper in their hands, and hear about them from the other secretaries later on, at the bar.”

  Randolph grinned back at him. “Thanks,” he said warmly. “I’d like to.”

  I bet you would, Spain thought. I bet you will.

  “Did you have any tea, Paul?” Linda Spain asked. “There’s some cold chicken in the fridge———”

  “I’d like some, dear.” Paul wasn’t hungry, but at least she would be doing something for him. “I didn’t have time for dinner before I left the House.”

  “Don’t crawl, Paul,” Murdoch said. “Just tell her to get it, and damn quick.”

  Linda Spain shot him a vindictive look, and stood up.

  “Oh, blast it!”

  One of the loungers on the floor had placed a glass half full of beer on the carpet at her feet. Now it lay on its side, its contents spreading in a dark stain all around it. They all looked down, Spain and his wife, Murdoch, Hanrahan, Randolph and the silent man by the door. Randolph was the first to move.

  “Let me,” he offered, dragging his handkerchief from his pocket.

  He dropped it on the stain, and knelt beside it. Across the white square, a smear of blood-red lipstick stared up at them. Spain’s eyes flickered involuntarily from the floor to his wife’s lips, and Hanrahan gave an almost inaudible chuckle, dry with malice. Murdoch’s face was impassive.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Linda Spain said serenely. She stooped to retrieve the handkerchief. “I’ll rinse this out for you, and give you one of Paul’s for now. No—it’ll be all right.”

  She walked from the room, and Spain, his face a little more strained than before, crossed to talk to the blonde in the chair. Murdoch went with him, and Randolph was left standing by the door.

  “He’s a good little bloke,” the dark man said softly, twirling his tankard and staring at the frothing beer in the bottom. “A damn good little bloke.”

  Randolph said nothing, but stared at him dubiously. What was he getting at?

  The dark man drained his tankard at a gulp, and looked up. There was a strange gleam in his small eyes. Almost hatred, Randolph thought. He’s nuts.

  “Too good for this mob,” the man went on in a soft monotone. “Too good for her, the bitch!”

  Suddenly Randolph was tired of it. Tired of the way he had come, tired of this place, tired of the familiar shoddy affair shaping the weeks to come. Outside, he could hear the silky-oak by the gateway, creaking in the wind, and its thin voice was the voice of the millions of trees, the avenues and belts and plantations of them that had been set out all over the valley. All around this hot and dim room with its cargo of intrigue and unhappiness and cheap passion; with old Hanrahan drooling over the drunken blonde when he should have been telling bedtime stories to his grandchildren, with Spain tight-lipped and weary, standing by; with the clots on the floor, nameless and faceless, laughing and whispering over what dirt and mean gossip God only might know. With Kerry and himself—and himself.

  He felt an upsurge of revulsion, almost praying to forget this mob, this unhappy bloke and his hot wife, to forget everything but the dark and the trees and the loneliness outside. Yes, and the ground, the red slush of this place that was the only real thing left. After they had superimposed a city on this wide valley, and studded it with stones brought from all over the world, and laced it into the confines of roads, and populated it with trees, many of them foreign, only the red earth remained real. Randolph tingled with a longing to feel it in his hands. His fingers rubbed involuntarily one against the other, remembering it and reaching for the comfort of it.

  “I seen him grow up, almost,” the dark man whispered, his fierce eyes guardedly on the thin form of Paul Spain. “I showed him the ropes when he first come to the House, and I drive him round now an’ then. He’s a bloody toff, and he’s saddled with that harlot.” His eyes flickered to the door where Linda Spain had disappeared, and then back to Randolph’s face, where they stuck like limpets. “Saddled,” he repeated softly, with a significance that Randolph could not evade. “For the rest of his blasted natural.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Randolph demanded with soft savagery. “Break out in boils? He’s old enough to look after himself!”

  The other said nothing. He stared at Randolph for a moment, then dropped his eyes again to his empty tankard.

  “Canberra,” Murdoch said, as they were walking home to Riverslake. “They reckon it means women’s breasts’—nigger talk. See?”

  He waved a hand at the dark humps of the hills that loomed, round and soft, against the sky; the night had cleared, the wind had dropped, and the air was clean and brittle and cold. The whole valley was a lake of thick darkness, but the sky was blue with the clear light of swarming stars.

  “Huh,” Randolph replied. His mind had been still on the house they had just left. “They reckon the moon’s made of green cheese!”

  Murdoch laughed. “You made a bit of a hit with Madame tonight,” he said. “Going to follow it up?”

  Randolph grunted non-committally.

  “I’m a bit of a gipsy, meself,” Murdoch continued casually, in a simpering tone. “Just love music and colour and dancing—and this!”

  Randolph turned sharply and stared at his face. It was only a dim blur in the gloom. “What the hell———?” he demanded. “Did you hear us, inside the blasted drawing-room?”

  “Heck, no. I got the full treatment myself, a couple of months ago. It’s a standard line.”

  “Then I wouldn’t want to go under your neck,” Randolph said sarcastically. “To say nothing of his—Spain’s.”

  “You should worry,” Murdoch laughed shortly. “Nobody else does. Anyway, I’m through.”

  They walked in silence, then, their shoes ringing sharply on the frozen black road beneath them. There were a few warm pink windows amongst the crowding trees, but for the most part the homes that they passed were, like the trees, in darkness. There was a quality of remoteness about the place, a feeling of having been cut off from the rest of the world by a barrier that was more than the distance, the silence, and the night. The immensity of the valley seeped through the hard shell of the road, through Randolph’s very flesh and into his heart. He shivered with a quiet ecstasy, feeling himself one with it. It was what he had wanted, in Linda Spain’s home a couple of hours ago; to lose himself in this impersonal vastness.

  “That’s a rummy mob she gets round her,” Murdoch commented, breaking a long silence.

  “Yeah—who are they?”

  “Oh, I dunno, apart from old Silver. He’s just a bludger on the taxpayers, but he’s got his points, I suppose. The rest are just characters she meets in the lounge at the Civic Hotel, where she does her drinking. There’s a nice old gang of dipsos get in there after work.”

  “What, is she a dipso?”

  “No—hell no! She goes there for company, and then drags the animals home. Poor old Paul! She’s bored, I think.”

  “She wants a couple of kids,” Randolph observed grimly. “That’s the best cure for boredom. What’s wrong with Paul? He ought to get on the job.”

  “Guess Madame won’t co-operate.”

  “Huh?”

  “Likes the bull,” Murdoch said brutally. “But she’s frightened of the blasted calf!”

  They had emerged from the maze of streets to the crest of Riverslake hillside. The camp lay below them, asleep. Beyond it, on the floor of the valley, strings of red lights crawled over the aerodrome and thinned out to single ruby brilliants on the dark slopes of Mount Ainslie. They stopped and looked at it for a moment before they began to pick their way cautiously down the slope amongst the rocks and tufts of grass.

  “Well, wher
e do you come in?” Randolph demanded, after a while.

  “Where did I come in, you mean,” Murdoch corrected him.

  “Well, where?”

  “Oh—I dunno.” Murdoch was silent for a while, then, “You come here, you meet her, and you get on the queue. Sooner or later you work up to the driving seat.”

  “The queue—hell’s bells! As bad as that?”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “She doesn’t look like a trull—a bit hot, but hell, not as bad as that!”

  “Well, she’s not, really,” Murdoch said thoughtfully, choosing his words. “I can’t make her out, and I can’t quite explain what I mean, but I think she’s in love with every bloke she lays off with. In some funny way, really in love, as if it was the only one. And all the time, there’s poor old Paul—she loves him, too. It beats me.”

  “And what about him?” Randolph demanded. “What’s his angle? Is he frightened to kick for fear of the publicity and what might happen at the House?”

  “I don’t think so,” Murdoch said. “I think he just loves her. The poor beggar loves her.”

  “He’d need to!” Randolph said bluntly. “And what about you? All over?”

  “All over!” Murdoch agreed crisply.

  The green light, Randolph thought, but hell, not for me! Not after half the urgers in the A.C.T.

  And yet, in the kitchen, she had seemed happy and simple, after the gipsy routine—his lips curled in a brief smile as he remembered—just like any girl in love who might turn it on occasionally for the right bloke but certainly not like one who’d be in it with anyone who happened along. Murdoch must have been exaggerating—that was the solution. He was only a kid, and kids naturally blew up things to over life-size, just to blow up their own part in it. And yet …