A Kindness Cup (15 page)

We?

Mr Jenner, his son and myself.

Go on.

We came round by the western base of the mountain in time to see Mr Boyd who had been a member of the party bending over a dead lubra.

And who was this?

A young woman called Kowaha.

You knew her? Mr Sheridan asked with horrible interest.

Yes. I had given her food on a number of occasions.

And for what reason?

None—except that she asked. Mr Dorahy went red with indignation at the implication.

And how had this lubra come to die, do you think?

She appeared to have fallen from the cliff. She had her baby with her.

And was the baby alive?

It was.

Would you imagine, Mr Dorahy, Mr Sheridan asked playing a small five-finger exercise on the edge of his desk, that the gin might have been helped to her death? Pushed say?

I don't know.

But you must have some idea. You say you know these men well enough after two years to assess a situation.

You are leading me, Dorahy protested. She was morally pushed, that's all I can say.

Ah! Then you admit you have no grounds for accusation of any violence at all against the members of the Separation League?

No. That's not true.

In that case how many dead did you see?

Only one.

The woman?

Yes.

Then you had no knowledge of what had actually occurred on the peak of Mandarana?

No. Yes. What I heard. Mr Dorahy was beginning to babble. You forget I found Lunt. Found him a week after these events. There was that as well. Violence like that. Oh, my God!

You must control yourself, Mr Dorahy, the magistrate said. He took a slow and careful sip from a glass of water. Mr Lunt has declined to give evidence. Suspicions, opinions are not facts and must not be brought forward in this court.

This is rubbish, nonsense! Dorahy cried out. You cannot allow justice to miscarry like this.

Mr Dorahy, the magistrate intervened, his face bright with anger, the court must not be addressed in this way. Unless you can control yourself I must ask you to stand down.

Control myself! Dorahy cried. Oh, my God! Control! His face began to stream with tears.

Through the glaze of them he observed young Buckmaster smiling at his father.

Mr Sheridan was enormously embarrassed. I must ask the witness to stand down, he said.

B
OYD HAS
put his press to sleep. ‘It's done,' he thinks and looks at a pull of his main story. Read in cold blood, it is far more drastic than he had imagined it would be. ‘Oh God,' he thinks, ‘but it's done now! The wolves will be onto my sled while Lucy and I brave it out.' Sweetman smilingly benign before election time will have his face changed for him. But how will the public react, he wonders. Put their money on the old favourite? Sweetman is out there wearing Buckmaster's colours and riding hard to win.

He rubs his palms together a little at this, feels the sweat skate between them, mops his neck and face with his handkerchief and gives a tuneless little whistle. His backstop, Madden, is putting the next day's issue together in the back room. Nothing can go back now. Only forward. Trumpets blaring, the troops on the move and Lunt, Dorahy and himself facing the blast of them alone on a high hill. Or valley, is it? Gully? Not even the dignity of height.

‘I've wanted,' he thinks, ‘to do something like this for years.'

He slips the pull into an envelope and shoves it in his coat pocket. He roars, ‘Madden!' and the young rabbit face of his assistant peers gap-mouth round the door.

‘I'll be out for about an hour. When McKay comes back tell him to hold the fort, will you? I'll be back soon.'

The street is blistering but it is only a short distance to the Sea Rip. Glare and sun work away at him and even panama'd he feels the bite of northern light. His eyes squint. The heat does not lick but rasp. Excited, nervous at what he has done, looking forward to seeing the last of the town with his gesture so firmly behind him: he will be able to do nothing but leave.

He passes Buckmaster who is leaving some café on the main street and they wave cheerios that will never be waved again. Already he has a sense of homesickness and observes with the eyes of the newly arrived or the about to leave. There's sadness in the docks at the end of the street, the boats pulled in from journeys on blue water, masts somehow thin.

Dorahy is only fifty yards ahead of him.

He saunters, then, to let him get back to the hotel. No point in having the day pronounce them to the roaring world. He wanders down to the water-front where peelings and papers wash round the piles and, watching the thick syrup of water slap and pull at the wharf, he has a slow smoke.

Dorahy, his glasses making him older and more benign, is lying on his bed reading when Boyd finally gets there. There was a gay party on the front terrace of the pub with Gracie Tilburn queening it over a bevy of drones. Waves. Cries. The party envisioned now as he gazes down on the solitary Dorahy who has uttered nothing but a little grunt since he said, ‘Come in.'

‘I've got something here you might like to read,' Boyd says, pulling the envelope from his coat pocket, and tossing it, an unconsidered trifle, onto the counterpane.

Dorahy slings his long skinny legs over the side of the bed and sits up. ‘You've done it?' he hopes aloud. Unfolding and then reading, his face changing with each line. The shock of it! Even the forgivable journalese! He reads the last few lines aloud and gives a great cry:

‘At last! And no one named. It's a miracle of circumlocution. No. Hardly that. Of discretion. Oh, my God, Snoggers, it's more than I wanted! More!'

There are tears somewhere. Each man looks away from the weakness in Dorahy, struck to the pith of him, and Dorahy gets up and goes to stand at the veranda door of his room. He is gazing across the water to the island. The dozens of blues. The island sky-floating above its own shadow. Isolated laughter from the terrace below. It is as if he is prepared to drown now in blue, the end being here at last.

‘You've done it for me,' he says turning to look at Boyd, with the weakness safely out of sight.

‘No. Not for you, Tom. It's my own gesture. Sorry to take the credit from you. But truly I have done it for me. Some rash beneath the skin. It is dying now, with this.'

‘What do you think will happen?' Dorahy is eager as a child.

‘Who knows? There's a final get-together in the hall tomorrow. Last night and all that. You and Lunt would be crazy to go. Buckmaster will have all the speeches organised. Stay out of it. You've made your point already.'

‘You've made it,' Dorahy says. ‘I was only reporting. It will finish you, I suppose,' he adds reflectively.

But Snoggers will be carrying a swag of victims with him.

‘Do you mind? Really mind?'

‘At the moment I'm too exalted with the excitement of it. Later, well, I don't know about that. Can't say. Already I feel the griefs of farewell.'

Dorahy is silent, then he says, ‘I feel guilty about that. Truly. But settled with God, somehow.'

‘Or the devil,' Boyd suggests. ‘You are a real
agent provocateur
.'

‘Maybe. Who knows? Who really knows? … Would you like a drink? Have you time or isn't it wise?'

‘It's unwise, but I'll have one.'

The darkness of the bar-room, its docile shadows, peels some of the age from their faces. They talk of nothings—the heat, the landscape, the last few days—and are halfway through their drinks when Sweetman and young Buckmaster walk in. They are the eclipse of the soul.

The noon door of Boyd's office has, with its closed-for-lunch sign, a vulnerable innocence that persists even after he has let himself in. The street outside is practically empty except for a dog lifting its leg against one of the
Gazette
hoardings. A passing comment, thinks Boyd. Just wait till tomorrow. Madden is still folding in the back room and is half-way through the issue, perspiring languidly with his shifty rabbit face bent in a whitened concentration over his work.

Boyd takes the completed papers and piles them on a trestle slide against the back window, thinks better of it and locks them in a press.

‘When you've finished,' he advises the crouching Madden, ‘lock the rest in as well, will you?'

He goes back to the front room and looks out the door at the dusty, decent street with its knobs of palms. Nothing moves. Is he imagining the lull? Then around the corner a dray rumbles and creaks past as he stands there watching and blinking. Just outside the horse drops its sweet-smelling dung. If he were a man searching for omens then he would find this lucky and could even grin. Chickens' innards, the movement of wild stars, the way counters fall. But he recalls unexpectedly the whiteness of Madden's down-bent face prosily withdrawn as he folds and stacks, folds and stacks, and on some uncrystallised impulse goes down the passage to the back room and stands regarding him for a few speculative moments. He does not look up. Why? Boyd wonders, with an unreasonable spurt of irritation.

‘Here,' he says, testily, ‘I'll give you a hand. We should get them finished by three,' He curses McKay for being still out at the town picnic reporting the follies.

They work in the heat and the silence into which the clock drops its seconds like blows. The tap over the basin drips unrhythmically. Irritable, after fifteen minutes, with a kind of abrading curiosity, Boyd stops his automaton hands and regards his back-stop, notes the indifferent pallor, the sparse stringy hair, the unhealthy flush of some skin disorder erupting on the starved-looking angles of the jaw.

‘Have you had a look through it?' he asks.

Madden's spidery hands hesitate in their work, but he refuses to look up. He knows the reason behind the question and has not yet discovered his own true reaction in the matter. Stalling, he says carefully, ‘Had a glance.' The hands have not once disrupted the rhymes of work—fold, press, fold, press, stack.

Boyd is cautious, too. This will test his loyalty, he decides, about which he has long had his doubts. The boy on the burning deck, Horatio at the bridge. All the troubadours of fealty singing together.

‘Tell me, Joe,' he persists, ‘what did you think of my centre-page story? The one on Mandarana?'

At this moment, Madden is not anybody's man, though he is a white-corpuscled fellow with the seeds of treachery bred into him. His pay is low enough for him to be suborned by anyone at all. Wageless and gutless. There have been past occasions when money has produced bogus red cells of a meretricious attachment. He grins uneasily, remembering.

‘Fair enough.'

‘Dangerous?'

‘I wouldn't know.'

Boyd places another folded paper very delicately on the pile: he is a man in whom the most vast of angers produces only the most antithetic response.

‘But you must have some idea,' he argues softly. ‘Do you think I am pushing it too far?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Then you know the background of all this? The things I've left unstated?'

Madden's pimples appear to flare. He says, ‘I've heard a thing or two.'

‘So.'

The hands resume their work while clock and tap wrestle it out and in the superficial air of truce Boyd gradually decides that he doesn't trust Madden although they have worked five years together. ‘Printer's devil!' he decides.

He is right not to trust. At some unspecified hour of concealing dusk Madden, with a discarded copy of the next day's
Gazette
folded small inside his shirt, seeks out Buckmaster to satisfy unformulated notions of preferment that he bears like an inner rash. If he wanted outrage, then he has it, observing the passionate explosions on the face of the reading man. Foolishly, Buckmaster cannot control his rantings and Madden grows small with fear and satisfaction.

‘I won't forget… will make amends… take my word … a promise a promise … very shortly you will be …' he raves to his shrinking stooge. While despising.

Madden can only smile and tremble with the excitement of disloyalty that has never bought him anything really yet. As he returns to dusk, his devious compulsions satisfied, he is perplexed by the inner emptiness that overtakes him.

B
ETWEEN THE
steak and the orange mousse, the flirtatious warblings of Gracie Tilburn and the more sombre conversation of the Jenners, Boyd becomes so conscious of an oppressive, almost sonorous quality of evil that he feels he cannot communicate, even on the flattest levels, with his guests. He pushes his chair back under his wife's anxious eye and says, ‘You'll have to excuse me for a little. I have this persistent feeling that things are not all right at the office. Don't ask me to explain right now, but I'll have to go back there to check up.' His fat-creased eyes are unhappy.

‘Take me with you,' Dorahy suggests. There is a moment's silence. Lunt questions with raised eyebrows, and finally, ‘No,' says Boyd. ‘No. Not for this.'

He leaves them while the pudding wilts. Outside, beyond the curiosity of their eyes, his own tension runs wild for a few seconds. Only a mile from town, he decides quickly that saddling the horse will not be worth it and sets off at a fat man's jog-trot, his heart knocking and his lungs soon announcing the pain. Gasping, he slows down to a walk and as he comes to the last straight stretch before the stores begin, he sees that which he has dreaded.

Fire is all rose and gold, excitement and orange joy, leaping and threatening, with blacker centres to flames than the heart could imagine. Its appetite increases with the reds and yellows, a hunger to paint colour all over a street's canvas. Its sound is animal and high-pitched and Boyd, who has seen its menacing light long before he hears its voice, knows exactly where it is and why. There are ghoul watchers already by the time he arrives and he can see, even from across the road, that someone has bashed in the front door to his office and that the room at the back is fully ablaze. He races ahead of his throbbing shadow across to the pulse of it, but the heat is too strong and strikes him back again and again. The smell of spirits is still in the air.