Highways to a War (4 page)

She looked away through the window, following the progress of a tow-haired young mother pushing a child in a stroller. She’d never spoken in this way before; never before uttered a serious criticism of Lockhart to me. Diana was reticent. But as is often the case with the reticent, once she’d started talking it led her deeper.

“Sometimes I think it might have been better if he’d been shot down in one of his raids over the Ruhr,” she said. “That’s when his life really ended.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said; but she looked at me without remorse, her eyes fixed, both hands gripping her cup.

“He was a beautiful man, when I met him,” she said. “He seemed to have the world in front of him as a journalist. I didn’t understand then what the War had done to him. He’d enlisted when he was twenty in the RAAF; a year later he was in the RAF in England: a flight lieutenant at twenty-one, bombing Germany. He survived a lot of raids—and so many of them didn’t. Just boys. And the terrible thing is, Ray, part of him liked it. He didn’t say so, but it’s true. He never really had a life he wanted after that. Journalism wasn’t enough. Something stopped in him like a clock, in the War.”

As she spoke, I was remembering the Lockhart of twenty years ago, when Mike Langford first started on the Courier. In the lounge bar of the Colonel Paterson Hotel on a Saturday night, Lockhart had presided, seated in his usual place, surrounded by a respectful circle of young reporters and photographers—Mike among them. In a town like ours, an ex—foreign correspondent was almost unknown, and had a film star glamour: the glamour of the outside world. Lockhart had many anecdotes to tell concerning his coverage during the fifties: the Korean War; the French struggle in Vietnam; the Communist insurgency in Malaya and Singapore. He was always in charge of the evening, and Mike became his most constant drinking companion.

As though hearing my thoughts, Diana said: “I wish you could understand how it was, Ray, when Mike first came to Launceston. Full of a farm boy’s dreams of the world: he was appealing, and Rex got very fond of him. Maybe he saw himself in Mike, before he stuffed up everything. We had Mike home for meals all the time, and Mike was always bringing gifts. He wanted to work abroad like Lockhart; he truly admired him. But he didn’t go away for a long time: six years. He enjoyed his life here: playing his club football; having his nights out with Lockhart and the rest of our crowd. But mainly he didn’t go because of me.”

I signaled for two more coffees.

“He’d been badly hurt,” she said. “He’d lost that girl he wanted to marry. The pickers’ daughter on his father’s farm: I don’t remember her name. I never knew what really happened, and Mike wouldn’t talk about it. She just disappeared, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. “She just disappeared.”

She stirred her fresh coffee, looking into the cup. “Mike and I were in love but we didn’t become lovers,” she said. “At least, not until the end. He had his girlfriends—I told him to, because I’d never leave Rex and the girls. But his affairs never seemed to come to anything. All three of us were friends: Rex was like a father, and I pretended I was like a mother.” She smiled. “Who did I think I was fooling? Mike was twenty-one when he first started on the
Courier,
and I was only twenty-seven. A lot younger than Rex, and I was starting to feel it. Mike and I would mostly see each other on Saturday nights in the Colonel Paterson, as part of a crowd. And afterwards the party at our place: you remember. My God, Ray, those nights in the Colonel! Like a dream repeating itself. Well, Mike escaped, in the end. From the lounge bar of the Colonel; from Launceston; from this bloody little island.”

She’d been picking at the varnish on a nail, her face bitter; now she looked up and attempted a smile.

“I always knew I’d lose him, naturally. He kept inventing ways it would work out for us, without hurting Rex or the girls: ways that I’d come away with him. I could go on loving him knowing it would eventually be taken away; but he couldn’t deal with that: he wanted to believe it wasn’t true.

“We were alone together only once, on the day after he got the news of the job on the Age in Melbourne. He persuaded me to come on a day trip with him in his car—down south, to Clare. Lockhart never knew. Mike hadn’t visited the farm since he left it for good. He wouldn’t call in, because his father was still alive, then. He really hated his father, did you know? The only person I believe he ever did hate.

“So he parked the car a mile down the road, and took me up through the bush onto the top of one of those tall hills. He wanted to show me his home, he said. He loved that valley—but he didn’t love the farm or that tedious old house. He told me once that the past used to get into his dreams at night there: bits of some life a hundred years ago that he didn’t want to know about. Clare was that sort of place, I suppose.

“It was a beautiful spring day. We sat in the grass on top of the hill, and we could look down on the property and on those green hop fields. The wattle was out, and the peach and pear blossom; it was all quiet, the valley, but alive, with a wonderful humming. We both knew we were saying goodbye; he knew it too. The difference was that I could say it. But he went on playing his game; he couldn’t bear not to, although we both knew that was what he was doing. After a year or two, he said, when he’d got some metropolitan experience and was ready to try his luck abroad, he’d come back and get me. I told him again that I couldn’t leave Rex, however much I wanted to, but he just smiled.

“Mike was old-fashioned, don’t you think? Growing up on that farm out there, it was as though he’d grown up in the last century. Even the books he’d read. A lonely kid, his brothers already grown up, getting a lot of things from books. He talked about a sentimental story of Kipling’s: I forget the name of it. He saw us as lovers in that story. Well, I’ll bet he’s changed a bit these days: he’s a tough nut, from what one hears. And he never married. What was it about him, Ray? There was something in him you could never know: something far away in him that made you at peace.”

She looked past me, out the window. It was after five o‘clock now, and the shadows were long in the Quadrant.

“He left for Melbourne the next week,” she said. “And he phoned me regularly at the shop for the next eighteen months. Then, one January, he suddenly arrived in Launceston. We met twice, alone. But only to talk: once at the house during the day, when Rex nearly caught us; once in town when we said goodbye.

“He’d quit the Age, he said; he had references to papers in London, and he was going there to try his luck. He wanted me to come with him, just like that; to finally cut the rope and join him. He was going in a week. And of course I couldn‘t, and he knew I couldn’t: it was still the game.”

She looked back at me, her face empty. “I’d better stop talking. I’m sorry, Ray.”

“Don’t be,” I said.

“That’s all gone,” she said. “But you have to
find
him. That’s why I wanted to see you.”

“Find him?”

“You could go up to Bangkok. Talk to the Australian embassy people; the journalists. No one’s
doing
anything.”

She wanted to believe he was alive. Her eyes had regained their color, in the fading light: young eyes in her middle-aged face, looking at me with the hunger of hope.

I’d reached the Derwent Valley, and the hop fields had begun. The narrow, winding side road to Clare was two miles out from the township of New Norfolk; the white signpost was still here, and I took the turn.

Mike Langford belonged to this southern zone of the island, with its towering hills, extinct volcanic peaks and Roaring Forties winds. I belong to the north: to open, pastoral distances and kinder weather. The north-south difference is as real here as in other regions of the world, and our two small cities have been locked in rivalry since the island’s name was Van Diemen’s Land. But here the difference stands on its head. Southern Hobart, the capital, once the center of the nineteenth-century penal administration that continues to frown in our collective memory, is the last city before Antarctica, its spirit cold and forbidding. Northern Launceston, founded as an innocent market town, is more lighthearted: closer to the continent, looking to the warmer latitudes across Bass Strait. So when Mike came north as a boy, he was making his first move towards the world beyond the island: I imagine he heard it throbbing on the breeze.

It was late afternoon. Getting down to the south had been only a matter of two hours or so, on today’s highways. It used to be a day trip: the island has shrunk, since my childhood. But the side road taking me into the long corridor of the valleys hadn’t changed: it was still unpaved, throwing up white dust, and it was taking me back thirty-odd years.

I’d forgotten the height of these hills. Enclosing, steep, almost overwhelming, they rose above the road on my left and right: bush-covered, dark olive, glowing in patches with dreaming sienna tints in the last hour of sun. The grass beside a small weatherboard farmhouse sitting on a knoll was dark green as grass in a storybook Northern Hemisphere, and scattered with yellow wildflowers; black Angus cattle grazed, but there was no other sign of life. The valleys still felt remote, and utterly self-sufficient: intimate, claustrophobic, brooding, shut in forever by their beautiful but jealous hills. Not an easy place in which to hide anything; not an easy place to escape. Of all the Langfords, only Mike did.

Here were the upright golden flames of the poplars lining the road, and the willows yellowing down by the creek. Here were the hop fields, and elms and pines and cedars: the country of early settlement, rich and Europeanized. Driving over the white wooden bridge that led to the farm, I found I was nursing an odd, melancholy excitement. I swung the Mazda to a halt in front of the gate, and the white dust billowed up the way it used to do in front of my father’s old Buick. In the field on the other side of the road, the stripped wires and poles, bare of hops, were like ruined structures in a war zone, and I wondered why it all looked so desolate.

Then I realized that it was always summer when I came down here as a boy, and that time was constantly rerun. The English oak trees in the drive were always out in leaf, and powdered with the road’s white dust, like the roadside poplars. The ancient, baby voices of crows complained always in the heat, and white cabbage butterflies were jerked as though on strings above the bush grass and wildflowers.

The last time I was here was in the summer of 1952, when Michael Langford and I were sixteen years old. There were six summer holidays before that: the first when he and I were ten, at the end of the Second World War. The holidays were a return of hospitality, in a way. Because old John Langford had gone to boarding school in Launceston, he’d insisted on sending his sons up there as well, instead of educating them in Hobart; Mike and I became friends at school, and I often had him to stay at my parents’ house on weekends. But another reason the Langfords asked me to the farm, I suspect, was that Mike’s three brothers were grown up, and his parents wanted him to have company of his own age out here: a surrogate brother. Surrogate brothers was what we became—to my benefit more than his, as I had no brothers of my own—and we were probably closer, since siblings tend to fight, and we never did.

There were only two Langfords left now: Cliff and Marcus. Old John Langford and his wife, Ingrid, had been dead for years. The gate of the property was still the same color: dried blood. The board was still fixed to the top rail, with the name Clare cut into it, picked out in black paint. It was one of the oldest hop farms in the Derwent Valley, and this minor valley took its name from it. It had been in the Langford family for over a hundred years, and I recalled Mike telling me it used convict labor, in the early days. But no one could ever tell me why the property was called Clare. Mike had the notion that this might have been the name of one of the pioneer women in the family; but I think he just made that up to satisfy my curiosity. History never much interested him.

The house too looked unchanged. It was rambling, single-storied, and built of the ochre bricks that we know in Tasmania as “convict bricks,” since they were handmade by the early felons; it stood on a low rise about thirty yards from the road, its red-painted iron roof and tall chimneys half hidden by cedars and the line of oaks in the drive. The cedars, with which most of the early settlers screened their farmhouses, darkened Clare’s front rooms, I remembered, and added to an air of somber secrecy there. An odd, still atmosphere always hung about the place: a heaviness which I wasn’t able to fathom.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the house was full of forbidden zones—most of them laid out by John Langford. I discovered this almost immediately, on my first, ten-year-old visit. One of these zones was the hop kiln.

 

 

Come and see the hop kiln, Mike said.

We crossed the farmyard from the house to approach a six-sided, medieval-looking tower of convict brick. I’d never seen a building quite like it. The steeple was of gray wooden shingles, topped by a structure like a dovecote, also six-sided, with wooden vents in it. The tower had only two small windows in each of the six sections, high up and low down, and was connected to a barnlike building, also built of the ochre brick. At ground level, in the tower, a series of big fireplaces led into tunnels: unlit, with old coal dust in them. I followed Mike inside.

He led the way into the tower and up a steep wooden stairway to the upper story, and we emerged into a deserted chamber with a floor of sacking, filled with a single, overwhelming smell. It was sharp and piercingly pungent: half sweet, half sour; half enticing, half forbidding. When I exclaimed at it, Mike raised his high-arched brows in polite surprise.

That’s from the hops, he said.

I asked him what the fireplaces were for, and he looked at me with an expression of sleepy amusement; he had heavy white eyelids. They’re from the old days. They used to roast convicts in them, he said.