Highways to a War (9 page)

By the end of the conversation, it was agreed he’d travel up with me in my car.

 

 

We left in the late afternoon. I was driving a battered Volkswagen that had got me through student days; beside me, in his bucket seat, Langford seemed a little too large for the vehicle. He’d become as tall as Ken, with the well-muscled body of an athlete, and I learned that he played Australian Rules football with a Hobart club. He spoke about his football as though it would interest me; it didn‘t, and we lapsed into silence. He was even less articulate than he used to be, I thought; I found his long silences baffling, and I told myself that he’d become quite dull.

The Beetle buzzed at its modest top speed up the Midlands Highway, which is built on the track of the nineteenth-century coaching road. Soon we were entering the pastoral Midlands: an ancient, dried-up lake floor whose small, gold-grassed hills are occasional and rounded, their trees few. Open grazing country extended into the distance, the mountains blue on its rim, and still Langford’s silence continued. But finally he turned and asked me about my new job.

I could tell he was merely being polite: I sensed that he could scarcely imagine why anyone would want to be a lawyer, and I answered briefly. Then I asked him about news photography. Why did he want to do it?

the country manner. Then he said: “I like photography: I’m good at it. And I’d like to cover the trouble spots abroad.”

He didn’t enlarge on this, and his silence enfolded us again. But as he’d spoken, I’d caught something in his expression that reminded me of the way he’d looked when he listened to newscasts on his radio in the sleepout, or studied
Terry and the Pirates:
a quick, fervent gleam. Perhaps he hadn’t grown dull, after all. His face had the strong planes of adulthood, and yet it was still very boyish: it still had the dreamy, almost infantile calm peculiar to the blond. Faintly smiling, he seemed to be gazing into the distances of some mythical sea: a place where I couldn’t follow him.

By the time we drove across the old stone bridge that’s the entrance to the village of Ross, it was growing dark; and here I broke another silence, and asked him why he’d left the farm.

But his face closed up; he peered out at the passing stone front of the Man o’ Ross Hotel, and simply didn’t answer. We were well outside the town before he spoke.

“Something bad happened, mate.” His voice was just audible, and he lit a cigarette before continuing. “I had a row with the old man. I walked off the farm. I’ve been doing odd jobs ever since.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Can’t it be made up?”

He shook his head. “It’ll never be made up. I don’t want to make it up. He’s cut me out of his will like he was going to do with Ken. The old bastard could be dying, and I wouldn’t make it up. I’ll never go back.”

I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it, but he shook his head again. “It’s history now, Ray. I never wanted to go farming, anyway.”

I didn’t press him, and the next silence must have lasted half an hour. Then, somewhere in the long straight run through Ep ping Forest, he spoke again, his voice only just audible above the noisy little engine.

“It was about Maureen Maguire,” he said.

And now he began to talk. His face, always in profile, showed little expression when I glanced at it. But it was illuminated only fleetingly by passing headlights, and I may not have seen all that showed on it.

The muted pain in his voice was another matter. It seemed to fill the car; to be one with the buzzing of the engine.

 

 

He’d wanted to marry her, he said. All through his teenage years, he’d waited for her every summer, when the pickers came. He’d proposed when he was nineteen, and she’d accepted.

“But nothing would make the old man agree to it,” he said. “He was a bloody snob: he said pickers were rubbish, and no daughter of a picker was good enough to marry. That wasn’t true; they were good people. And Maureen was a Catholic, and he had no time for Catholics. I hated the old man for that. There was no way he was going to stop me marrying her—but we agreed to wait until I was old enough to leave the farm.”

He paused; then he began again, and there were no more pauses after that. He was talking about Luke Goddard.

It’s a long time ago now, and I can’t reproduce the rest of his words exactly. The things that come back to me most vividly may not always be the things he laid most emphasis on himself; and it seems to me now that he kept coming back to the nettles in the gully. The stinging nettles and Luke Goddard seemed oddly connected in his mind—and I thought I could half understand this. Like stained and mildewed cloth, their smell itself stained, the dark green weeds recalled something terrible: something in an ancient life that had to be paid for.

He’d followed Luke Goddard about when he was young, Mike said. This was at eleven and twelve years old, before he took up with Maureen. After that the position would be reversed, and it would be Goddard who would follow them. Since Goddard was said to be mad, he was a diversion; and Mike had the idea at eleven that a mad adult might reveal secrets that sane ones hid from children. But the hermit rarely spoke, except occasionally to turn and abuse him, in that gabbling language of his that could scarcely be understood. Or maybe the words were too difficult, Mike said: his father had once said that Goddard had been “an educated man”—speaking of him in the past tense, as though he were a corpse.

He told me how he’d once peered through the door of Goddard’s gray weatherboard hut, when the hermit was out. He’d seen unclean bedding, and piles of junk; there was a smell like the den of an animal, and he was afraid to go in.

The old man had led him over those spaces of grass that were green as Wales, and beyond into the bush grass I remembered: territories wan as paper. And then Goddard went down into the gully: a place of fear and gloom. That was where the stinging nettles were: spiteful, stained weeds from an older, stained century, an older country, making Mike know he’d come too far. He somehow conveyed the notion to me that when he entered this gully he trespassed into the nineteenth century, when the farm had been founded. And he’d come to see Goddard too as coming from that century. I don’t think it was an idea he’d thought out very clearly; but it seemed to be real to him.

The hermit had suddenly stopped, one day, and had quickly looked at Mike over his shoulder. His white face was spiteful, threatening and suggestive. It could be seen to know about things that were old and filthy; there was old spittle in the corners of the mouth, and Mike had turned and run up the slope of the gully. But the old man had shouted after him, and this time the words had been clear.

You! You’re nothing but a bloody farmer’s boy! Do you know who I am? A prince! I’m a
prince!

When Goddard wasn’t looking, Michael had photographed him. And when the photographs were developed, the figure that appeared was much more remarkable than the one that he’d focused his camera on. Luke Goddard in these pictures seemed not to be human, but instead to be a black spirit in the landscape, passing with bent head.

In this form, in his dark jacket, he came into Mike’s dreams. He came through the window of the sleepout and tugged at the counterpane, trying to draw Mike out into the night of a hundred years ago. And now his stern face had changed: it was young, noble and refined: a dark prince of the air.

Over the years, on their evening walks in the bush and along the creek, Mike and Maureen would catch glimpses of Goddard following them, at a distance. Or he would be standing under a tree as though by accident. For some time, Langford told me, they took little notice.

But one evening he’d appeared to them from behind a tree, holding what appeared to be a white, upright candle in front of his black coat. Then Mike had turned on him.

Piss off! You hear me, you filthy old bastard? Piss off!

But Goddard had shouted after them, his words suddenly clear.

Mike had advanced on him, fist raised, and the old man had begun to scuttle away into the trees. But as Goddard went, he shouted again.
I know! I know what you’re doing! Getting into her pants!
Hidden, going down a gully, the hermit had shouted obscenities: just single words, without logic or reason, echoing in the bush like dismal eruptions from the earth itself. After that, Mike said, he and Maureen had met in the hop kiln at night.

I could see them, lying on the sacking floor of the drying room, clinging together with an intensity like fear, the hop smell all around them. Sometimes they’d hear a creaking or shuffling down below, Mike said: even a creaking on the steps. It’s him, Maureen would say. He’s down there. Go and look, Mike. I’m scared of him.

But Mike had never found Goddard there, and had ceased to take him seriously. Nothing was serious but their love. He didn’t even take it seriously when she told him Goddard had exposed himself to her again, meeting her alone by the huts. Langford saw the hermit as a foul clown; nothing more.

Just a pathetic old bastard swinging his mutton, he said. That’s how I saw him. I was that bloody stupid. Now I still have dreams about it, he said: always the same. Maureen and I are standing at the end of the drying room, holding each other the way we used to do. There’s the stink of last year’s hops, in the dream, and the smell’s part of the fear. The place is like a jail: you remember it, Ray. The old brick walls; small windows; half dark. Maureen used to say it was scary there, and it was, in a way. It always felt as though there was someone else in there somewhere: someone you couldn’t see. And I always know in the dream that there really is someone—someone else is in the kiln besides us, even though I can’t see anyone.

In the dream, I’m always asking Maureen to come out of the kiln; but she’s hanging on to me and begging me to stay. Stay, she says. Don’t make me go back. I only want to be with you.

The stronger the smell gets, the more I want to get out, he said. But she won’t come; she’s crying and hanging on to me. Then I wake up, and I know it’s too late to save her.

He lit another cigarette and stopped talking, trying to stretch his legs. I waited, and after a time, he went on.

It happened when I was away in Melbourne for three days, he said. Cliff and I went there on a trip: one of the few times the old man ever gave us a holiday from the farm. Goddard must have been stronger than he looked. But Maureen wasn’t a big girl. He not only raped her, he knocked her about, I was told—I don’t know how badly. And I never saw her after it happened. When I came back and found out about it, the Maguires had packed up and gone. It had all happened in those few days; the family had disappeared, and Goddard was gone too. I never found out where he went, and he was never even arrested or questioned.

Then my father talked to me. He said Goddard was too crazy to know what he was doing. He’d driven him off the property. But he made out that Maureen had probably invited it.

I wanted to kill him for that, Langford said. I said things he’ll never forgive, before I went. I left the farm that night, and got a ride into Hobart; I’ve never been back.

He turned to me. His face, in the white lights of the oncoming cars, suddenly looked older: I had the illusion of looking at a haggard middle-aged man. She didn’t wait for me, he said. I’ve searched for her everywhere, but she and her family just disappeared. She didn’t wait for me to come back. I’ll never understand that, Ray.

I tried to offer explanations, drawing on my brief legal experience. Timid girls like Maureen, with nobody to back them, were always reluctant to testify to being raped, I said. They feared with good reason that police and defense lawyers would humiliate them, and hint that they’d brought it on themselves—just as old Langford had done. And maybe his father had even let the Maguires know that this was his suspicion: and his word with the police would have carried more weight than theirs. Maureen’s family would have feared John Langford, and feared the police too: didn’t pickers see police as natural enemies? So flight had been the only answer for them.

But none of this satisfied Mike. He shook his head, staring dumbly through the windscreen, and relapsed into silence again.

I’d conveyed to him how appalled I was; but I found I wasn’t really surprised. Goddard had always been the carrier of some malicious intention. It would have been two-thirty on a hot afternoon when he did it, I thought. Yes, it would have been then: the time of tedium and madness, when the light was like congealed fat; when murder moved in the wood-heap.

 

 

“It’s good of you to let me have this stuff,” I said.

“It’s what Mike wanted,” Marcus said. “He told us in the last letter he sent us.” His dark eyes rested on me for a moment; then they shifted.

Nothing had changed in the storeroom. Its objects all appeared to be in their original positions; there was a tricycle added, no doubt belonging to one of Cliff’s children. Nor had the silent, mildewed air changed. The only real difference was that the afternoon light, coming through the holland blind (whose edges now were frayed and crumbling), seemed less intense. Perhaps the glow was diminished by the autumn.

We were standing beside the table in the center of the room. Letters Mike had written to his brothers, packed into a shoebox, sat at the end nearest us. There was also a little pile of black-and-white news-style photographs of Mike and other cameramen and journalists, taken in various parts of Asia. Some were copies of those I already had; others were new to me.

“I put these together for you,” Marcus said. “Mike wrote to Cliff and me at least once a fortnight, all these years. He was very good with letters. He told us all about his life over there, and the political situations in the countries he worked in. We learned a lot. I thought you might like to borrow them.”