Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (18 page)

‘Not yet.'

‘It must be getting on.'

‘I'll go and look at the clock in a minute.' She closed her eyes and the image of the disintegrated plane was still tumbling over and over through her mind. It disturbed her, detaching her from the pleasure of the weight of his arm on her body. She ran her fingers along his forearm slowly, tracing with the tips of her fingers the raised veins and the hard roundness of his muscles. After a while she turned towards him. The wind came in a sudden rush and the screen door banged and thumped, just as if someone had come into the house. More strong gusts followed, shaking the timbers and rattling the tin. The thunder rumbled across the valley. The room grew dark as the storm rolled forward over them. They did not speak to each other of their fear that Rankin and the children would soon be home, having left town early and driven fast to beat the rain. They lay in each other's arms under the covering darkness and the comforting noises of the storm. After a time they made love again.

At last she got up and went out to the kitchen to check the time. Incredibly it was only a little after eleven. Rankin could not possibly be back with the children for at least another hour. They decided they were hungry, so they ventured into the kitchen together. While she made the cheese-on-toast, he made the coffee. She told him to bring the banana cake as well and they carried their feast back to her bedroom where they sat cross-legged side by side on her bed with the eiderdown round their shoulders. As they ate they watched the rain falling in sheets across the closed grey landscape. Neither mentioned it, but they both prayed that the storm extended as far as the road beyond the creek crossing. For beyond this point there was a long stretch of deep unsealed black soil—a few millimetres of rain would be enough to make it impassably slippery for perhaps twenty-four hours. They needed at least that much time.

The smell of toast and the shared warmth of their bodies within the enclosing tent of the eiderdown restored her calm again after the excursion into the kitchen. When she had gone out to check the time she had been overwhelmed by the absence of the others; traces of them were everywhere. It was unsettling and made her feel jumpy. Her bedroom was hers alone. No one else ever went into it. She could share it with him totally. She could give it to him with all her feelings about herself. There was no need for any complicated mental manoeuvring to avoid the other active shadows.

‘You're leaving the best bits,' he said, eating the crusts she had left on the plate. The telephone rang and they looked at each other and listened: two long shrill bursts followed by a short one. It was their party-line code. She gave him her cup to hold and got out of bed to answer the phone at the wall extension in the passage. There was a lot of static and then the voice of the girl on the exchange. Ward's clipped tones came over clearly, issuing her with orders at once and providing her with a minimum of information. He wanted to know, among other things, if Robert had returned from the fence before the storm had broken. ‘Yes,' she said, then on an impulse she added, ‘We're just having our lunch.'

She admired her own audacity, but it disturbed her at the same time. She pictured herself standing naked in the passageway, as if through the eyes of certain neighbours and some people in Springtown: Ward Rankin's wife, you know the young Sturgiss girl, the coordinator of the successful fundraising carnival, naked in her passageway talking to her husband on the telephone. Ida Rankin and that English boy they've got working out there, the minute Ward's back's turned. The breeze blew coldly along the passage. ‘Yes,' she said, striving to sound normal, ‘It's raining heavily right now,' in answer to Rankin's enquiries—it was like pretending to be sober while being drunk. She doubted that she was being completely convincing.

Another chill blast drove through the house and she began to shiver. She wanted to get back into the warm bed with Robert but forced herself to ask if Gil had got away all right. She immediately wished she'd said nothing, as Rankin straightaway wanted to know—as if she would certainly have the answer—what was the matter with Gil. He had seemed, Ward said, preoccupied. Not like him. She replied that she supposed Gil was growing up. She closed her eyes and waited for him to get off the phone.

Crofts re-admitted her to the eiderdown tent, placing it round her shoulders and helping her to snuggle up. She told him quickly, ‘They're staying at my cousin's place tonight.' He looked at her, accepting the good news in silence. ‘You're to take the jeep and meet them at the Avondale turn-off tomorrow after the road's had a couple of hours sun on it.' Crofts listened and said nothing.

She watched the beautiful dark screen of the rain falling across the paddocks. She breathed deeply to rid her mind of the intruding images, more confident now of her relief and her happiness. The fresh smell of the rain off the dry heated grass and the familiar smell of her bedroom mingled with the warm spiciness of his body. She made no effort to resist the profound seduction of the moment.

Together they watched the rain.

‘There can't be many people out here doing this,' Crofts said, breaking a long silence.

Out here,
she thought. Obliterating neighbours and other inconvenient details, she saw a grey uninhabited vastness of bush stretching around them to every horizon and beyond, the two of them seated at its centre in perfect isolation. The image was of a perpetual present, without any tomorrow. She said to herself then, ‘It has all happened and it is all real.' He looked at her and asked her what she was thinking.

‘Tell me about where you grew up,' she said. She knew the image in her mind would accept whatever he chose to place in it. ‘Describe everything in detail. I want to know.'

He laughed and said, ‘What sort of things?' His past, he felt certain, could not be interesting to her. It was only this that was interesting.

‘Anything—describe the house you lived in. Suppose we're standing together in front of it looking at it—what does it look like?'

He hesitated. An image of the grey cliff-face of the Council flats obediently waited to be described. He realised it wouldn't do. He moved a little further west, a few streets away, up the hill and through the park, and described for her instead the facade of one of the comfortable semi-detached houses that he used to pass on his way to school.

‘It sounds lovely. And what was in the front garden? Was there a tree?'

He deftly removed a lilac tree from the school grounds and placed it in the bare little garden. A great improvement. It was a white lilac and he made it bloom brilliantly in the sunlight against the red bricks; he filled the air for her with its heady perfume and with the inviting warmth of an English spring day. Together they admired the effect—it was more real for
them
than the real thing had ever been for him. Inside, the house expanded as they explored it, taking on the fullness of their desires. Fragments of the truth bound the invention together—he managed to resist the temptation for a grand piano, sensibly reducing it to an upright (it was either that or the fact that there had been no piano at all); his mother, so she had once told him with regretful pride, had briefly (perhaps for no more than a week or two) received piano lessons at the convent; he generously endowed her not only with the ability to play sonatas and fugues but also, on second thoughts, with a specialist's knowledge of the cultivation of flowers.

And in this way he filled the house and his past with flowers and music, yet felt at liberty to acknowledge to Ida his own profound ignorance of these things. It was a splendid stratagem. On the basis of it he began to reinvent himself. The fiction was not a lie—he was not trying to deceive her—but was a metaphor for the richness which he believed was in himself, but for which he could see scarcely any external evidence.

They hardly noticed that the bedroom was growing dark and that the storm had passed, leaving beyond the window a chill sparkling sky of early stars.

It was Ida who took the conversation beyond imaginary houses and invented histories and began to speak of life itself; tentatively at first, then more boldly and, as she went on, she discovered in herself an urgent need to talk. She became excited and perhaps talked too much, taking for granted in him an understanding that may not have been complete. But she could not help herself. So she spoke eagerly to him of life and love; she dismantled her ideas of good and evil and laid out the pieces before him; she pondered the old question of God-or-not and left it on its side; she probed at why things are as they seem and wondered how they might be changed or endured; whether everything was a great and unfathomable illusion or a bare matter of fact.

While he did not always follow her reasoning, he escaped with her nevertheless into this world of abstractions that enthralled her. She overdid it. She said things that were wild and untrue and which no sane person would maintain—in her enthusiasm she exaggerated her belief that everything was possible. But the distortion did not matter. He was uncritical. For him, at least, her outpouring was a chant, a song of love, and he was willing to be mesmerised by it—it was an energy and delight that made her glow, become fierce and beautiful in a way he could not have imagined. He could not have mistaken her now for Mrs Rankin, the boss's wife. She was herself—she might even escape him.

They did not risk leaving her room again. As the night deepened, the cattle station and the house and her husband and her children, the whole local community and the bush around them vanished from their minds. Ida consigned it all into a limbo of unmeaning and it had no chance against her. She was irresistible and she spoke of things that she had never talked about with anyone before.

They forgot where they were until he said, ‘The sun'll be up soon.'

Words and ideas continued to jangle in her head but she forced herself to stop talking. Out the window she saw that the first pink light of morning was glowing on the summits of the ranges. The rain had cleared the atmosphere, sharpening the planes of light. For a brief moment stars, night and the first light of day trembled together in an exquisite balance of soft hues and shadows. Without warning a sadness rose up in her. There was nothing she could do about it. The night was over.

‘What's the matter?' he asked quickly.

She smiled. ‘Nothing.'

He took her hand and began to examine each of her fingers separately. Absently he twisted her wedding ring between his own fingers, then stopped abruptly when he realised what he was doing.

‘We have to plan how we're going to meet,' she said, forcing herself to speak of the need and hating the hard-edged tone of her voice. Withdrawing her hand she looked at the ring—it would no longer pass easily over the knuckle of her finger. She wondered if it were stuck there for ever.

He waited for her.

‘I used to go off on my own, on all sorts of excursions into the bush,' she explained. ‘I'll pretend I've taken it up again.' She met his gaze. ‘I'll come and see you when you're working up at the old fence.' She waited for his reaction.

‘That'll be great,' he said, puzzled by the suddenness of her change of mood; the disjointedness had taken him by surprise. He felt he had missed something.

She looked out the window. It wasn't good enough. She was fighting down a horrible feeling that it wasn't going to work. That it was already finished. That she had
talked
everything away. Suddenly she desperately needed to be reassured.

‘You look tired,' he said, then added quickly, ‘I guess we're both tired.'

She rubbed her face with her hands, wishing the darkness would return. Beside the creamy unblemished sleekness of his body in the dawn light she felt lumpy and old. ‘I must look awful,' she said.

‘I don't have to go for hours yet—why don't we have a sleep?' He reached out for her but she avoided him, adjusting the covers over her shoulders.

‘You didn't tell me in the end,' she laughed. ‘I didn't give you the chance, did I? Why you came out here?' She felt angry and wanted to blame him, to find fault with him—to detect a flaw somewhere in his beauty and his civilised English past. Aware that she was being unjust, she persisted nevertheless. ‘Why did you leave all those wonderful, gentle, interesting things? The music and the flowers and everything, the opportunities you must have had, just to come here?' She was not sure what she was really accusing him of and broke off abruptly, suffering for her attitude but continuing despite herself, knowing it could only harm them. Her resentment would not be pacified; it had something to do with being achingly tired. Obstinately, she thought, ‘It's not my fault.'

He wondered what to say. Before tonight there had been no music or flowers or anything civilised. She had brought all that to him. There
was
the meaning he had put in his life—his work. To absorb himself in his work. He sensed, however, that even if he could have explained this to her, she would have been puzzled by such a limited view and would not have felt the worth of it that he had always understood—something to do with the rhythm of doing things and a pleasure in exercising his skill and his body that absorbed him.

He laughed and shifted uncertainly on the edge of her bed.

That
had already begun to slip away from him. He didn't regret it. It was already the past. He wondered now how things could ever have seemed that simple to him. He had begun to occupy, it seemed to him, a higher level of understanding, a place from which the view ahead was new and larger. He looked at her. He wasn't sure what she wanted at that moment, or what she had really meant by her question. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I've sort of forgotten why I came out here.' He thought he saw tears then, or perhaps it was just fatigue, in her eyes. ‘Everything before tonight's a blur,' he said. ‘I'll make up a better answer when I've had some sleep.' He lay down with her and pulled the covers over them, and held her in his arms.