‘Eh?’ The truck farted once or twice and started, almost knocking its driver down. ‘Switzerland!’ he shouted. ‘Greg’s in Geneva.’
Eddie was in laughing mood. ‘Was it a pretty post-card?’ he called.
Prowse was so incensed, either by the effeminate word, or his own indignity, that he jumped inside the truck and drove off without answering.
When Eddie had saddled the delicate creature his new horse, and she stood snorting back at him, all forelock and rolling eye, Mrs Tyrrell came out to congratulate and admire.
‘Arr, she’s lovely, ain’t she? A real treat! A little darlun!’ she gushed like some lady of a higher class, and unfolding her arms from under the black bobbled shawl, stroked the glistening neck and even planted a kiss above the beast’s tremulous muzzle.
Eddie was suppressing his own delight, to reveal in private to the object of it. ‘Wonder what we ought to call her? We’ll have to think of a name, Peggy.’
‘Goalie,’ she announced without second thought. ‘Goalie’s ’er name.’
‘How do you know?’
‘That’s what Marcia said it is.’
‘What’s Marcia to do with her? It’s Mr Lushington’s horse. Isn’t he the owner of “Bogong”?’ he reminded a lesser servant with a primness he immediately deplored.
‘That may be,’ Mrs Tyrrell agreed dreamily. ‘But I’d say Mrs Lushington bought the horse. Marcia’s a great one for gifts. You should ’uv seen the bassinet she give Dot and Denny for that poor squeaker of theirs.’
Eddie mounted his ‘gift’ and headed for a boundary fence Prowse had told him off to repair. The filly went cautiously at first, then with increasing pleasure in her own paces, and only random snorts as they left the settlement behind. Several times she shied, and once almost scraped him off against a sapling when a rabbit scut startled her. But horse and rider were becoming acquainted, accepting each other.
‘Coalie!’ When he had been flirting with the shameful idea of calling her ‘Ouida’. Would Prowse have known enough? Who had at one stage confessed to Meredith.
But Goalie — and Marcia!
He was standing on the brow of a hill without his shirt, the black filly tethered close by. He had finished straining a difficult length of fence where it plunged into a gully, and was rucked over rocks, and damaged by driftwood and floodwater, when his employer’s wife rode up.
‘What a coincidence,’ she remarked, ’to meet on what is — if not my favourite — almost my favourite ride.’
Faced with the extent of her idleness, he must have looked as surly as the manager. He was also, somewhat ironically, embarrassed by her finding him without his shirt, but her brief glance showed no sign of proprietorship.
He put on the shirt and stood stuffing the ends into his pants. During this operation she even looked away, her face expressing disinterest rather than modesty.
‘I’ve always liked it up here,’ she said. ‘It’s different from the rest of the place — rough, but sheltered. It’s good for having a howl in if you feel like one.’
‘Do you often feel like having a howl?’
‘Not often. But sometimes. Like anybody, I expect.’
He went to untether the black filly.
‘Do you like your new horse?’ she asked.
He was surprised at her use of the generic word; he would have expected her to be more specific, like a horsy man revelling in horsy terms. But she seemed as detached as her own bay gelding, arching his neck only tentatively, his nostrils suspicious of an unfamiliar female.
‘She’s a nice little thing,’ Eddie admitted with equal restraint. ‘It was good of Greg to think of me — in Switzerland.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he’s in Canada — on his way home — if he isn’t sidetracked to Ecuador.’
‘But thought of me, none the less.’
She did not answer immediately, but as they descended the steep incline, swaying in the saddles as their horses propped and felt for a foothold amongst the rocks, Marcia suggested, ‘It might have been Don’s idea. I believe the grouchy old monster has your welfare at heart.’ Then she uttered a short flat laugh. ‘In fact, I’d say he’s quite fond of you.’
Marcia sounded, or was trying to sound, as indifferent as when she had shown him that his naked torso was of no interest to her.
Eddie said, ‘I don’t think I understand Prowse,’ and pricked up his ears for Marcia’s reactions.
She did not react. Perhaps they were not deceiving each other; it was becoming boring.
They emerged from the scrub into a pocket of pasture at the foot of the hill where ewes were lambing. Some of the mothers hurried their offspring away, others continued ruminating, unwilling to disturb the wriggly lamb bunting at an udder. One ewe stood transfixed, but only for a moment, torn between the instincts for self-preservation and motherhood, then resumed licking at the gelatinous envelope containing a lamb recently dropped. The parcel on the grass responded to her continued rasping: the lamb began breathing, rising, tottering into the first stages of its life.
‘There!’ Marcia herself breathed, and led them at a tangent to avoid disturbing the lambing ewes.
This woman of a certain age, in her velour of a dedicated dowdiness, and stretched, even ravelled old cardigan, looked curiously innocent. She had little connection with Marcia Lushington his mistress of thrashing thighs and voracious mouth. While the body remained heavy enough, the spirit which possessed it seemed to have regained a purity of youth.
Whether he sensed the transformation, the opulent gelding on which she was mounted was carrying his rider with a prim, spinsterly respect. And the new black filly had thrown off any vestige of unbroken folly and was stepping out, thrusting her neck into the wind with a show of conscientious, almost ostentatious, maidenly sobriety.
Marcia broke the silence. ‘What are you going to call her?’ she asked.
‘I’m told her name is “Coalie”.’
‘Oh God, that! Nobody belongs to their given name. Or some of us don’t, I like to think.’
She fell to giggling, and he joined in. They were soon bumping against each other, uncontrollably, unreasonably, like schoolgirls who have shed the boys during an interval at a dance.
Till they came upon a second mob of lambing ewes; when Marcia sobered up. ‘Let’s go this way,’ she breathed, ‘so as not to frighten the poor wretches.’
She took him by the wrist to guide him. Again she was a mature woman, but one in whom purity had never been disturbed by lust. She was the mother who had buried three children in the graveyard at ‘Bogong’, and who could not have conceived the third in the circumstances her pseudo-lover Eddie Twyborn had suspected.
Consequently Eddie loved her for the moment with a pure, unadulterated joy. He lowered his eyelids against the glare, and finally closed them. He could have nuzzled the breasts he visualized inside the old ravelled cardigan.
Marcia must have led him purposely on the opposite side from the Lushington graveyard. On reaching a stand of aged pear trees below the house, she turned to him and said, ‘You know, Eddie, how I appreciate you, don’t you? What I’m trying to tell you,’ she said, ‘is how much we — all of us — love you — whether you realise it or not.’
The suppleness had gone out of her voice, the flesh fallen from her cheekbones, the chalky ridges of which had something of the agelessness of the hills surrounding them.
He might have continued staring at this other Mrs Lushington if their horses had not begun to sidle.
Whereupon Marcia rustled up a handful of reins from the pommel of her saddle. ‘I’m so glad I came across you where I did. Wasn’t it a lovely ride back?’ She lowered her eyes, and there was nothing dishonest in her modesty. ‘I don’t think Prowse could hold it against me for taking you away from your work.’