Things were not so easy for his uncle. Lachlan saw this because he too felt it. Something had been destroyed in him that could not be put right. He watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone. He was watchful now. There was always a little niggling worm of denial in him, a need to seek out, even in the straightest of men, some hint of crookedness that might be the truth even they did not know. He was quieter these days. He had moved away into a distance in himself that even Lachlan felt he could not presume on, and what he experienced there began to engrave itself in lines upon him, though he too kept up the pretence that life, in something like the old form, had resumed and would go on.
Lachlan did not believe it. He was still at the stage where everything presented itself in the absolute, as a possibility to be carried blithely into the future or done with, once and for all. When he was forced to qualify, as with Hector, he felt uneasy. He was so changeable himself he wanted the world, even in the bitter form in which he now saw it, to be fixed. So when he went to visit Gemmy at Mrs Hutchence’s, a little shamefaced at having left it so long, he was surprised to walk in on a noisy company whose existence he had had no conception of, though Janet, and Meg too, had tried to tell him of it. And here they were, all, seated at a table among teacups and crumbs — Janet, Meg, Gemmy, Hector, even the schoolmaster — with Leona pouring tea out of a blue pot. They turned to face him, looking up out of the same mid-sentence, whose unfinished hilarity hung in the air, and he saw with a pang that in all these last weeks, which had been such misery to him, they had been happily settled, even Hector, in this lighted corner of the world.
They made a place for him. Leona introduced herself, and gave him tea. There was a little cake too, with raisins in it, which crumbled in his hand when he bit into it. He looked up, very self-conscious, to see if it mattered, but it appeared not to, and he added to the scatter of crumbs.
Just the same, he felt awkward. They went back to their lively chatter, which was all half-joking banter that the others seemed practised in and which he did not know how to enter; all its terms were unfamiliar to him. He sat glum and silent and only Gemmy, he thought, amid so much jollity, moved in the same dark strand with him.
But he felt displeased with himself. There was, he saw, some other lighter way of responding to things. These others had found it. What was wrong with him that he could not?
He kept an eye on Hector. He had expected the older boy might be abashed at being caught like this in the company of women, and girls — not to speak of the schoolmaster. He kept waiting for Hector to tip him off, with a wink, that his part in it was a kind of foolery. But Hector was the noisiest among them. Didn’t he know what a clown he was making of himself, with his slick hair and his empty gallantries, or that Leona, to whom they were addressed, made fun of them and was too old for him? He blushed for his friend. Only slowly did it occur to him that some of Hector’s showing off was for his benefit; he was expected to be impressed.
What puzzled him most was the presence of the schoolmaster, who said very little. Was he embarrassed at being discovered here, as Hector might have been and was not? But after a little he saw that Mr Abbot too was included in Leona’s teasing, and did not mind it any more than Hector did, and that Hector’s sallies, in a joking way that suggested an understanding between them, were meant to be measured against what Mr Abbot could produce.
He produced very little. It was Hector who set the pace — Lachlan was astonished, where had he learned all this? — and was the more unconstrained, the more skilled too, at answering Leona back and provoking and pleasing her.
She tried the game, briefly, with him. She had a different tone for each of them, and he thought he detected in the one she chose for him a degree of mockery — for his youth, was it? — that brought a flush of indignation to his cheek. She saw it and drew back, but when he was ignored he took offence. She saw that too, but did not know how to help him.
And Janet?
In these last months they had grown apart. He was already aware of a change in her, but it was now, in this company, that he saw how great it might be. He had taken for granted always that their lives were intertwined, by which he meant that her chief concern must be him. She did nothing to deny it, but was absorbed, he saw, in a world of her own that he had no part in. He caught looks between her and his aunt that had not been there before, and when he burst in upon them once, with his usual expectation of welcome, was surprised by the faces they turned to him, which were attentive but subtly closed.
It had struck him then, and for the first time, that there might be areas of experience that he was not intended to enter. That closed look marked only the closest and most gently guarded of them. Beyond lay others that had never heard of him and never would hear.
He was shaken. In the revelation that a power he had taken for granted in himself might have limitations, he felt much of it fall away.
Meanwhile, here at the table, Janet met his eyes and flushed with embarrassment. Not surely for him!
He found an excuse to get away, though Leona protested. Gemmy went with him, and they walked a little way on the road together. They barely spoke. Gemmy was sick. He too felt sick at heart. He promised to return but knew that he would not, and Gemmy knew it too. They stood a moment, then he turned and moved away.
He looked back once and saw that Gemmy too had turned, about sixty yards off, and they faced one another down the white ribbon of track. They were too far off to be more to one another than figures whose eyes, whose real dimensions even, were lost to distance.
For years afterwards he would have dreams in which he would stand trying, against the fact of distance, to see the look on Gemmy’s face, and once or twice, in his dream, he walked back through the white dust, which rose in ghostly spirals around him, and went right up to where he was standing, and looked into his face. But it remained as blurred as it had been from sixty yards off, and he woke with his cheeks wet, even after so long, though he was no longer a child.
18
AFTER THREE YEARS in the north, Mr Frazer was delighted with Brisbane. The service at Marr’s Boarding House was cheerful, the jug and basin on the washstand a wonderful guarantee of the amenities, clear water, steaming hot in the mornings, and the soup at the table d’hôte agreeably thick.
The little town was very little, not much more really than a village, and this surprised him considering the almost mystical importance they attached to it ‘up there’, but impressive monuments were in sight. They were shadowy as yet behind scaffolding, but one or two of them had stepped clear and stood broad-fronted and substantial above the verandahed hotels and weatherboard bank buildings and stores, the picket fences, and rutted, rather twisty lanes where, on his morning walk to the top of a wooded ridge, he met barefooted youths driving cows.
The Governor, he soon discovered, was a very visible figure. He dashed about the unpaved streets in a gleaming chariot, wearing epaulettes and a sword, and gave the impression, with his ramrod stance and lean profile, of being the embodiment of a distant, almost unapproachable power. But when Mr Frazer presented himself at Government House, it was Sir George himself who looked out of a window and called him in.