I am abbreviating. For every road Charles took he came to a fork that had to be noted if not explored. He covered many points, including the origin of his suit and the explanation of the oil stain on the cuff, before he revealed that Mr Gibson had told him that the sighting in the Gulf was not the python in question – there had certainly been no scale count – but another python or rather a snake commonly called a python, but in fact not a python at all.
His host and hostess were mopping up their gravy with big lumps of snowy baker-shop bread and Charles was still trying to get the first lump of spud into his mouth but he had not, even though he had abandoned Mr Gibson, been able to complete his answer.
He sat talking, his elbows resting on the checked oilskin table, while his pythons ate their fill, lazily doubling their bodyweight; they oozed their way through holes in the hessian wall-lining and lay plump and lumpy amidst the dry black seaweed insulation Les Chaffey had brought all the way from Geelong. Charles watched a skin form on the top of his stew. He spoke faster and faster. He was grateful for his host's kind attention and, at the same time, although he knew it was wrong of him to feel it, he was angry and resentful that they would not let him eat.
And yet he might have eaten in the end for his answer, although it seemed, as it uncoiled itself, to be never-ending, eventually began to taper and, finally, showed the divided subcaudal scales of the very tip of the tail itself. He should have had time for a quick mouthful before his host's next query, and would have, had he not noticed the aforementioned person leaning forward and staring unashamedly at his black eye. He was, as I have already said, ashamed of the story behind his injury but if he were asked a direct question about it he would have no choice but to tell the truth in all its humiliating detail.
The sun had now gone and kerosene lamps had appeared in the course of Charles's answer. They cast a deep blue shadow and it was the quest for this soft hiding place that made him push his chair back and turn his head in such an awkward way. Once he had his eye tucked safely out of sight, there was nothing the Chaffeys could do to persuade him to eat. He patted his stomach and declared himself satisfied. He could have cried with disappointment.
"Did you", Les Chaffey said, helping himself to his guest's uneaten food, "have a barney?"
Charles stared at his host, transfixed.
"A blue?"
He had a headache, and his neck hurt too.
"A stoush?" Les Chaffey suggested, leaning across his laden plate with knife and fork poised, his eyebrows skew-whiff in anticipation.
Charles shrugged miserably.
And then, as Marjorie Chaffey watched in the soot-curtained lamplight, something occurred that she would remember for a long time but never be able to do justice to in words except to say: "What a lovely smile."
But this is an inadequate description of such a miraculous thing. The smile that Les and Marjorie Chaffey received from their guest was a request not to persist with the question and a generous reward for not doing it. But it was also much more than this and his Messianic grandfather, had he possessed such a gift, would have had all Victoria queuing up to buy his cannon.
That night Les Chaffey would dream of chopping wood, splitting open an ironbark log and discovering a red rose, miraculously untouched, within its hollow core.
4
Les Chaffey was a man who could not see a loose thread in a pullover without pulling at it, or spy a horse without trying to pat it. If he met an Italian he would want to hear the Italian language spoken and then have many common English words translated ("Now then, what would know how it was cooked and what went into it. This behaviour gave him a name as a sticky-beak and a gossip. It made no difference that he had also invented several ploughs and a device for grubbing Mallee country or that people had journeyed all the way from Melbourne to inspect them. This gave him the additional reputation, not totally undeserved, of being dangerous.
He had a gramophone and several Tommy Dorsey records. He sat in the hot dining room or on the veranda with shirt sleeves rolled up, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his white ankles showing above his slippers, his head cocked on one side, listening like a dog to an inexplicable sound. He did not give the impression of a man listening for pleasure, but one wishing to make sense of a complex language.
Les Chaffey had left school on the day he turned fourteen and he had always regretted it. But he had come to believe that if he asked enough people enough things he would end up with an education regardless. He had, therefore, trained himself to ask questions.
So as his wife stacked up the dinner plates, Les smiled at his guest and combed his wavy fair hair, not from vanity, but in the style of a good mechanic who wishes everything in order before a machine is stripped down. He removed the odd hairs from his comb and dropped them fastidiously on to the floor.
A mouse, running for its life, slipped and fell from the rafters, upset the sugar bowl and scampered off the table.
Les Chaffey sat, smiling, in the lamplight.
Charles shifted in his seat. He had the feeling something was about to start and he did not know what it was. They were waiting, it would appear, for Mrs Chaffey to return from the kitchen.
She hurried in, shuffling softly in her slippers, and scraped her chair and folded her hands in her lap.
"What would you make", Les Chaffey began, tucking his comb neatly into his shirt pocket, "in your line of work, in an average week?"
Charles was wondering if they might give him an aspirin or a slice of bread, but he decided to deal with the question first. But when he had answered, it was quickly replaced by another.
What was his experience with the red-bellied black snake? How did it differ from the blue-bellied variety? What was his mother before she was a Badgery? Would they be any relation to the Minyip McGraths? What does your father do? What do you reckon about Mo McCaughey? Who do you vote for? What's your opinion of General Franco?
Charles answered this last question carefully, but when he discovered his host was both a nationalist and a socialist he told him the truth: that he had been on the brink of going to fight against "that mongrel Franco" when he had been waylaid.
Les, of course, was interested. He herded the spilled grains of sugar with the edge of his hand and when he had them into a little pile he swept them into the sugar bowl. Then he placed the sugar bowl on the shelf behind his head.
"Now," he said, "how did it happen?"
Charles was thinking about the Harrises' house at Horsham -they had served him six lamb chops for breakfast and cut a lunch for him to take when he left. They had put sweet gherkins on his cheese sandwiches and he had thrown them away because he did not like gherkins. Now he regretted it. He could, for instance, have taken the gherkins off the sandwiches. He could even have washed the gherkin taste off the cheese. He had been a mug. He would never throw away good food ever again. Even if he could not have got rid of the gherkin taste from the cheese he could, at least, have kept the bottom slice of bread which the gherkin had never touched.
"You were on the boat?" Les Chaffey suggested.
"No, I never saw the boat."
"He had the ticket," suggested Mrs Chaffey. It was the first time she had spoken, but Charles liked the way she leaned towards him as she spoke.
"I had the money for the ticket to get to London."
"Right," said Les. "You had the do-re-mi. You had it in your pocket."
"In my money belt."
"In your money belt, right you are. Then what happened?" The shutters were all propped wide open and Charles could hear the cry of a solitary owl, Mo-poke, Mo-poke. He was about to ask for a slice of bread and then he looked up, the question on his lips, and he saw how keenly Mrs Chaffey was listening. He decided to tell the story first.