‘Sure thing,’ Mrs Tyrrell munched. ‘She offen rides round the paddocks with Greg and Prowse. Or Prowse alone — it don’t worry. You can’t say she’s not a good sort, though some run ’er down — say she’s a stuck-up nobody from Tilba. They say — well, I’m not gunner repeat. Those are the ones she don’t wanter know. You can’t know everybody, can yer? Even I know that.’ She sighed and re-settled herself.
‘Yes, you’ll see Marce. When you’re wealthy you’ve got time to put in. Arr, it’s hard on the women — the wealthy ones along with the others. You can’t expect ’em to spend all their time readin’ the libr’y books or shakun the mothballs out of their furs.’ Peggy Tyrrell’s eyes were at their brightest, their blackest. ‘Lushington wanted a son. I reckon they must’uv give up after the third go. They’re all there,’ she said, ‘in the graveyard down below the house. Arr, dear,’ she sighed, ‘it’s the funerals I miss out ’ere. Never missed a funeral in town. Knew everybody like me own ’and. They allus invited me ter do the layun out.’
She went to bed after that. The following day would be Sunday, and though reared a Catholic, she was looking forward to the Protestant service. Every third Sunday the Reverend Hannaford came out from Woolambi. On Sundays Peggy Tyrrell wore four extra teeth between her fangs. The teeth spent the week greening in a tumbler of water on her bedroom sill.
He was coming to terms with his body. He had begun to live in accordance with appearances. His hands no longer broke out in blisters; his arms, if not muscular, were at least lithe and sinewy. Sometimes on a calm day, by snatches of winter sunlight, while straining fences, digging out rabbits, or following Prowse’s tractor to loop a chain round a clump of briars, he might take off his shirt, and the men would watch, not respectfully, but without showing too much disapprovaclass="underline" Prowse in his smelly overalls, Jim and Denny in their khaki shirts buttoned up to the throat, their frayed serge jackets discarded only at the height of summer; or old Lushington might ride by, apparently for the sole purpose of sharing with his friend the Judge’s son some joke which wasn’t. At first irritated by the old man’s partiality for an ignorant novice, the men finished by accepting a relationship based on education or class.
Prowse possibly didn’t. It was difficult to fit the manager into any social category. He was as liable to lapse into educated speech as Greg Lushington would talk uneducated to his men.
Prowse said, ‘I used to read before I married Kath. Ever read any Peacock, Eddie? Or Meredith? There’s a writer for you!’
‘No. My education was neglected. My father intended me for the Law.’ It wounded him to wound the Judge, and not so unintentionally.
‘Well, you missed something if you never read Headlong Hall or The Ordeal of Richard Feverell. Though it’s all gingerbread of course. I gave it up when I married and life became serious. Kath thought reading novels a waste of time — they weren’t real. She was for magazines. She kidded herself she knew the people she’d seen once or twice on the social pages. She could talk about their homes, their clothes — their divorces, by the hour. It was her religion like.’
Prowse poured himself another drink. ‘My old man warned me against getting bogged down in any sort of myth. Dad was an Anglican parson who lost his faith, then went broke on a place where Mexican thistle had taken over.’
The parson father and the bookworm son were such unlikely apparitions that Eddie wished he had the courage to conjure up Eudoxia in the same weatherboard room.
Prowse swallowed an ugly mouthful. ‘Went out into the paddock one night and shot ’imself through the mouth — amongst the bloody thistle.’
Eddie began to feel an affection for poor bloody Prowse, which didn’t accord with his own intentions, and which probably would have earned him one on the jaw from that scabby fist.
‘You men!’ Peggy Tyrrell had come in from some outer darkness. ‘Yarn yer ’eads off if yez gets ’alf a chance — and accuse we women at the same time!’
Eddie Twyborn was cantering home. It was a tranquil evening beneath a pale green sky soon to darken. Curlews could be heard calling in the tussock with an abstract melancholy which was curiously comforting. In bays scalloped from the river bank, cushions of white scum had collected, bobbing against the vigorous flow of brown water. A trout rose, and plopped back.
He was content, with evening, with the scent of frost, his own smell, the stench of leather on a sweat-sodden horse.
He had even developed a kind of affection for this gelded monstrosity the Blue Mule, dipping, swivelling, dislocating, then re-uniting in its various components beneath his thighs. When the animal snorted and shied. The tangled mane was cutting into the rider’s fingers. Before he started falling. A sawdust puppet dragged. Trampled amongst sparks from the road. Under this feverish green sky, curlew calls, cushions of bobbing grey-white scum, the gobbets of a horse’s vegetable dung, flow of blood, of water, of blood. Of the burst puppet. Fading into the green white. Drowned in crimson …
The brakes were applied so violently, the chassis shuddered, the headlamps danced.
‘Hi! Ed, boy? Ed?’ It was Prowse’s voice, boots approaching stiffly over frosted ruts.
The figure lying on the edge of the road began stirring. Eddie Twyborn, realising that he was still himself, grew conscious of the pains shooting through his ribs, legs, head. He must have been concussed by the fall. None of him was manageable, anyway by his own efforts but oh God, he was still here, if he wanted to be; he was not yet sure. He would have liked to eat an ice, a sorbet delicately flavoured with cantaloup, morello, or pistachio.
Don Prowse was mumbling grunting panting as he encouraged dragged finally lifted. ‘Lucky I was out in the yard when the bloody horse got back.’
‘Poor old Mule. Nobody’s fault.’
Their passage to the little runabout Prowse drove about the place, to work, was excruciating to say the least. Accomplished in the end, Eudoxia, deposed empress or current hetaira, would have liked to thank, or in some way reward, the sweaty brute who had carried her halfway across the Bithynian plain. She might even have allowed him to ravish her in one long painful orgasm. Instead, after being lumped on the tray of the vibrating Ford runabout, beside a coil of fencing wire, several spanners, a jack, and a spare can of petrol, Eddie Twyborn fainted.
They discussed whether to transfer the patient to the Woolambi cottage hospital.
‘No, no,’ he protested, already belonging to a dun-coloured, draughty, weatherboard room, which light entered only when wind agitated the hawthorns outside; he had begun to associate light with the motion of his head against the pillow and hawthorn spikes scratching at glass.
‘No!’ he repeated.
‘Not if anythink ain’t broke. Not if the poor bugger don’t want it,’ Mrs Tyrrell insisted. ‘I’ve taken on worse ’n this. Nursed a family of seventeen, and a ’usband in the last stages of cancer.’
He had a sudden vision of a withered dug flexed for action.
Dr Yip agreed.
Prowse had explained before the doctor’s arrival, ‘Doc’s got a touch of the Chow, Eddie, but a good bloke for all that.’
The patient responded to an exotic eye, to the wind-burnt hands with under-cushions in crumpled pink. The doctor decided there was, in fact, nothing broken, perhaps out of deference to the sick man’s passionate wish not to be moved.
They all took turns at mauling him, particularly his forehead: it had become their dearest possession, a talisman against thwarted love. He closed his eyes and let them get on with it.
He overheard Peggy Tyrrell and Prowse, whose strength had been enlisted in lifting the body, quarrelling over a hard stool in a bedpan sent down from the homestead.