Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (15 page)

He watched the sweat and the dribble and Hill's ugly swollen skin, red and blotchy and beginning to look porous and permanently damp. He would wait for the bell. The decision was in him suddenly. He understood. That would defeat something in Hill which there was no other way of getting at; and Hill would know himself defeated and would hate him more for this than if he pounded him senseless. He watched the frustration come into the exhausted airman's face and saw the insolence and contempt give way to a look of incomprehension as the counterattack failed to come.

Hill waited, reeling, hanging on for the end; and when the end did not come he gazed into the stockman's eyes. Crofts smiled and pushed him away gently. Sensing time slipping by, the crowd began to boo and whistle and yell insults, urging the stockman to pound Hill into the canvas.

Crofts turned away as the bell went, leaving the exhausted foreman's son standing in the middle of the ring on his own. The stockman retained a sharp, satisfying image in his brain of Laurie Hill's puzzled look of defeat. He felt the referee grab his right arm and raise it in the air. The crowd whistled and booed and stamped their feet. It was not the end they had desired. The stockman bored them after all. They yelled for the next bout.

Crofts held out his gloves palms-up for the station owner to unlace. The corner was all excitement around him—Gil and some people he had in tow. Crofts felt no excitement but a residual aggression, a feeling of being old, an unaccountable resentment. He watched Ward Rankin working at the laces and he noticed how sunken and grey his boss looked close up. Perhaps Rankin had always looked like this and he'd only just noticed it. One good punch and he'd fall out of his sack. Rankin's eyes flicked up and stared blankly at the stockman's, picking up signals, but not making an engagement. Crofts wondered what it was in Rankin that would ultimately make him open up. He knew that to beat Rankin physically would only stir up some ultimate resistance, might even confirm a fanatical martyring resilience in him.

‘There you are,' Rankin said, pulling the gloves off. He clapped them together and handed them to Crofts.

Crofts thanked him and picked up his towel and followed Rankin out of the ring. Neither of them said a word. Crofts had the disturbing feeling that he would never again hear the impatient disparagement he had come to expect from his boss. He would have preferred it to this silence.

The next contestant was waiting. ‘You upset a few people tonight, mate,' he said with respect and envy, and then he laughed.

In the dressing annexe Laurie Hill lay on the bed that had been provided by the St John's people. He was still in his shorts and his father and two of the men who had been with him in the pub were standing by him, looking at him and talking quietly among themselves. They stopped and turned to watch the stockman as he came in. Crofts hesitated, then walked over and looked down at Hill.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Never better,' Hill replied and he shook his head. ‘Jesus!'

‘We'll get you, Crofts!' muttered Ray Hill.

Just then Gil came in through the flap and he called out, ‘Get him now!' He was a bit drunk.

Crofts ignored them. He turned away to get dressed. He had seen the emptied features of an old man prefigured in Laurie Hill's exhausted face and it flicked through his mind that he was vulnerable to all this himself. He wanted to get away quickly. He would not stay for the presentations. He told himself he had only let Hill off the hook, that was all, but he could find no reassurance in this assertion and his unease persisted.

Waterhouse came in after a while and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You've earned yourself a golden eagle tonight, son!' he said loudly.

Crofts told Gil he was going for a leak. It was cooler outside. The last of the evening light was just fading from the sky. Beyond the rides the double doors of the hall stood wide open and from them came the sound of a band warming up. He stood in the shadow of the tent. The last bout was getting underway behind him. Someone came out of the hall into the light of the doorway. It was Janet Rankin. She looked up at the beginning of the night sky, her head thrown back and her arms hanging by her sides. She was dressed like a woman but stood loosely like a child in a paddock. She looked for the moment like the innocent kid she had seemed during his first month or two on the station. He was on the point of stepping out of the shadows and strolling over to her for a chat, when she turned and went back inside the hall as if someone in there had called to her.

He wondered what they would have said anyway. He would only have been finding out from her where her mother was. He had expected to see Ida at the fights.

He took a deep breath and looked around; the hall, the rides and the boxing marquee were the only places that were lit up. His energy was unused. He felt restless and aggrieved. Maybe he would go in again for the presentations after all. Why not? He had won. A golden eagle! What had Ida said? ‘They give stupid golden eagles to the winners.' He could see her now, in her swimming togs, standing on the rock ledge after she had rescued him, looking shiny and vibrant, the sun in her eyes.

She was probably in the hall right at this minute, with her hair gathered on top of her head, wearing her country woman's dress and organising something. He made up his mind to go across and look in, just to confirm that she really was there. To see her. That's all. Perhaps he would somehow find the courage to remind her of how they had rolled about together in the water almost naked. And as he reminded her he would watch her reaction closely. The fact that she had not come to see him fight and that he had chosen not to smash Hill seemed to bear a significance for them both. He wanted an acknowledgement of this. The noise in the boxing tent behind him was increasing again, the last fight was coming to an end. Waterhouse would be doing the presentations any minute. Crofts moved out of the shadows of the boxing marquee and made his way towards the lighted doorway of the hall.

part two

five

Ward Rankin sat at his desk in the room he had made his own in the middle of the house. There was a pen in his right hand and a glass of whiskey at his elbow. He was re-reading for the tenth time some numbered notes he had been making on a pad in front of him. A cigarette burned steadily in a glass ashtray. He had not started the generator and the bulb was dimming then brightening in response to the irregular flow of current from the storage batteries. It was almost three in the morning.

They had arrived back from Springtown over an hour ago and the house was now quiet and settled around him. He had not planned to stay up. He was certain he would not sleep and had come in for a drink and to be alone for a while before going to bed—his head had been aching and when he had got out of the car his skin felt slightly irritated all over. Once alone he decided that he would try to settle something. It seemed to the station owner that for some time he had been compiling a mental dossier on Robert Crofts' character. He
felt
as though there were a great many facts concerning aspects of his behaviour that could easily be verified and which, in their totality, indicated a disturbing conclusion.

Rankin was worried. He wanted to feel convinced he was being balanced about this. He wanted to stand back and take a considered look at the basis for his anxieties. His guilt, however, was complicating this process for him. After handing Crofts over to the Hills he had indulged in a subtle plan. Now he was pretending he had never devised any such plan. This was not such a difficult thing because the plan had never had any details: he had visualised himself ‘rescuing' Crofts from his defeat at the hands of Laurie Hill and ‘carrying' him off to a gentle place for recuperation. For a little while—from the conversation with Waterhouse in the pub until about halfway through round two of Crofts' fight—it had been a very exciting and secret idea. He had savoured the idea of Crofts being
in his care;
somehow from then on their relationship would at last be graced with understanding, perhaps even with respect and a degree of attraction.

He had watched the stockman defeating Laurie Hill with a complex mixture of feelings that amounted in the end to dismay and resentment. He had not known what to say to him afterwards. Incapable of congratulating him, he had felt awkward, ridiculous and bitterly offended in a way he could not hope to justify. Gil had been celebrating vigorously and Alistair had stayed close—like a gloomy personification of his own fears. Rankin had never felt so publicly defeated.

He reached for his glass and swallowed a large draught of the neat liquor, then took a long pull on the last of the cigarette. When he had been unlacing the stockman's gloves Crofts had measured him with a look that had revealed his desire to assault him. He was certain of it. He could still ‘see' it. When Crofts had left the tent, he had been left with the memory of that look. It justified his resentment and his alarm. He had clung to it and had begun at once to enumerate his suspicions.

At the top of the page on the pad in front of him he had written:
1) From the very beginning, although I only saw it after
a while, changing everything around to erase the Rankins' history
here.
He didn't like the word
history,
it wasn't the word he wanted, but he left it there nevertheless because it was more inclusive than a word like
mark.
He did not want to seem to be making anything up or to be idiosyncratic in these notes. In the back of his mind lay the thought that there might be an audience for them. They were therefore not absolutely candid. He had finished this entry with:
This didn't alarm me it just irritated
me at first. Looking back, however, I see he set about it with such
a will that there must have been a motive behind it.
Below this he had left a space and had written:
2) Intentionally discarding
a valuable edition of
Gulliver's Travels
in a way that was clearly
meant to insult me because he must have known his action would
be reported to me by
and here he had at first written
Alistair
and then crossed this out and written
the children,
before continuing:
A real affront this and nothing imagined about it. Anyone would
be angry.
He had underlined
Anyone
twice and had deeply scored a black asterisk in the margin opposite
2).
Following this was
3)
Shooting Julia.
After
Julia
he had placed a question mark which he had erased then replaced. Below this he had written and then crossed out:
Why didn't I confront him properly in the yards?
He effaced this entry more thoroughly now, going over it with the biro until it could no longer be deciphered. Then he wrote:
This
incident is too old now to be revived. But he did actually do it and
so it must count against him for something.
Rankin was aware that there were flaws to his reasoning but he went on anyway as if there weren't.

There were two more entries after the last cramped amendment:
4) Hanging back on his own and firing off a shot from the
.303 dangerously in the direction of the swimming camp and
when asked what he had been firing at replying in a vague and
unsatisfactory way. Then later the same day returning alone to
the house while we were all at the swimming hole and searching
my room, taking my Colt and firing six unexplained shots in a
strange way.
A large question mark followed this entry. He wrote now:
How am I supposed to interpret such ‘messages' except as
threats? There is a doubt about the Colt which I shall clear up by
asking him a direct question. If he says he didn't do it I shall bring
the rest of the household together and expose his lie. Then sack
him at once.
The last sentence had been crossed through lightly.

The final entry on the page had been written and re-written a number of times. It was a mess. The surviving versions of it were:
Looking at me after the fight as if he wanted to kill me
—
Looking
at me as if he intended hitting me
—
Looking at me as if he were
thinking it would not take much to kill me
—
Letting me know by
his look, so that I was the only one to know it, that he had something
unpleasant in store for me. This was all done so cunningly
between us that I have no way of proving it even though there
were others present.
He was becoming increasingly unhappy with this entry and tried:
His look said it all,
but crossed it through at once, writing instead:
I didn't imagine it. It was in his eyes.

Rankin stared at what he had written. His right eye was failing to focus properly so he half-closed it. He was very tired but still he did not get up and go to bed. He was conscious of leaving something out of these notes. What he could not sort out was this: had the stockman rescued him from the earth tank or had he driven him into it? What strange beguiling force had made him feel rescued rather than threatened? There was the blazing fear, the excitement and the great uplifting glow of being carried naked in Crofts' powerful embrace . . .

Rankin got up and carefully refilled his glass from the bottle on the sideboard. He had seen the way Crofts had coldly, almost ritually, bashed Laurie Hill and then let him hang on the edge of defeat. Doing it with his humourless English reliability as if it were another of the tidying-up jobs around the place, as if he were clearing rubbish.

He sat down at the desk once more but he did not look again at his notes. He knew what he would do. He would give the stockman an ordinary job that would fully occupy his working day and then see how things developed from there. It was simple, all he had to do was treat Crofts like an ordinary station hand and any odd behaviour would stand out.