If they hadn’t been within view of the house, he would have kissed Marcia Lushington for a tremor in her right cheek.
Anyway, she had turned her horse. Jaunty with the knowledge that a feed of oats waited for him, Hamlet was bearing his rider off, this middle-aged woman practised in adulterous rites.
Summer was upon them, a sun the fiercer for being so long watered down, waves curling white on hectic seas of barley grass. After hanging his blankets on the line to air he found them crawling with the minute threads of yellow maggots.
‘Arr!’ Peggy Tyrrell laughed. ‘It’s only the blowies. If it wasn’t for the good old blowie you wouldn’t know for sure that summer was with us. Give yer blankets ’ere, love, and I’ll fix ’em for yer.’
She carried them off, and returned them decontaminated, if reeking of kerosene.
He found himself slouching stupefied in the saddle as he rode round the paddocks, squinting through his lashes to keep out the flies, his skin cured to the tone and texture of any of the local stockmen. To a stranger he might have passed by now for a local. Often his companions forgot he was not one of them and asked his opinion, which they seemed to accept. But he did not believe he would ever learn to fool himself, as apparently he could deceive others, and as so many others deceived themselves.
Prowse, for one.
On an occasion when Mrs Tyrrell’s monologue had driven each of them early to his room, the manager called through the thin wall, ‘Why don’t you come in, Ed, and have a yarn? Not very sociable, are yer?’ The voice was still accusing when his offsider appeared in the doorway.
‘You couldn’t call either of us sociable, walking out on poor old Peggy.’
‘Arr, Christ! Peggy’s all right. But women finish by givin’ yer the gripes.’
‘The girls in town?’
They were seated opposite each other, pyjamas limp, rank with summer.
‘Girls!’ Prowse grunted. ‘There’s a time and place for anything.’ His need for sociability forced the manager to pour his guest a drink. ‘That one — Valda — that I told you about — I might even marry if the wife ’ud give me a divorce. But Kath’s the sour type that hangs on to what she considers ’er rights after she’s bloody shown she doesn’t want ’em.’
He knocked back his drink, scratching at his chest through the gap in his pyjama coat.
He brought out an album. ‘These ’ull make yer laugh!’ he promised, while appearing far from mirthful himself. ‘Old photos.’
He began turning the khaki pages on yellowed to greyer, more recent snapshots, in most cases meticulously mounted, with captions in white ink.
A few loose snaps slid out in the beginning. He gathered them up, but not before Eddie had identified the thin woman from the enlargement on the wall.
‘That’s Kath,’ Prowse muttered unnecessarily before leafing on through the album.
‘Here’s Valda,’ he indicated more enthusiastically with a blue thumbnail Eddie could remember receiving a hit from a hammer.
A plump smiling girl in a hat, Valda was shown holding a racquet as she stood pressed against the tennis net.
‘Take it from me, Valda’s the good oil!’ Prowse bumped his guest’s pyjamaed knee with his.
They forged on. There were the blank spaces from which Kath must have been dismounted, only in half-hearted revenge for the enlarged Kath still ruled his room.
‘That’s poor little Kim,’ said Prowse.
She looked a disapproving child, with more of her mother in her than her father. The moment after she had been snapped, her upper teeth would more than likely have clamped on her lower lip as she wondered whether she had done right in exposing herself to a camera.
Prowse turned and turned.
‘That’s me brother.’ He sighed. ‘He was killed in action.’
‘Me brother’ was a Light Horseman, too bronzed, too lithe, too beplumed, too much of a good thing, with death already in his light eyes.
Prowse turned the page too quickly.
After the brother, the group was something of a relief: of average, clumsy, lumpy blokes.
‘Those were some mates of mine — who enlisted. It was taken just before they embarked.
Eddie was examining the mates, when Don nicked the page.
‘Don’t think, Eddie, I wouldn’t ’uv enlisted. I know you were in the War. They told me about yer decoration. I would ’uv. But Greg pointed out I was doing a necessary job. And Marce;’ as Eddie had heard several times before.
The coarse fingers were torturing the pasteboard edges of the khaki snapshot album.
Eddie Twyborn felt like blubbing as he hadn’t since he came across his first corpse.
‘So you see?’ The host poured them another drink.
Prowse turned the pages of the album.
‘Who’s this?’ Although you knew.
‘That’s Mum.’
She had an aggressive jaw and was wearing an A.I.F. brooch pinned across the V of a print frock.
‘She never got over Bert’s death. Well, you can understand.’ Don sounded as though he were making excuses for his own earlier excesses.
‘And this?’
‘Mum when she was younger.’
Mum was holding a frocked moppet with abundant curls. Rather a pugnacious, scowling child. A miniature of herself in fact. Mum’s scowls were girlish then.
‘But the kid?’
Don’s thumb rasped against the edge of the page. ‘That’s bloody me! That’s how she kept me! That’s what they do to yer when you’re helpless,’ he bellowed. ‘The women!’
His knees were bumping against his guest’s, through the thin sweaty poplin of summer pyjamas.
Eddie said, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep, Don, or I shan’t be up in the morning.’
‘Anyway,’ the manager said, ‘we had a yarn. And that’s something I didn’t think yer capable of.’
‘How?’
Without answering, Prowse bowed his head; he was pretty far gone by now. Several snaps of Kath fell out of the album.
Eddie wondered whether he should pick them up, but didn’t.
He stood for a moment looking down on the bowed head, at a balding patch on top of it, that of an orange, tonsured monk.
He wondered how the man would have reacted had he bent and touched the patch of skin. He was tempted to do it. Drained of his masculine strength and native brutality, Prowse was reduced to a harmless, rather pathetic ape. Eddie’s heart was thumping, but he managed to restrain his inclination. It was too incredible, to himself, and might have shocked one who was perhaps not drunk enough.
Instead he put his arms under the armpits and began easing Prowse on to the bed as he had done many times before.
‘Thanks, Ed — you’re the good oil …’ he thought he heard as the heavy arms slithered briefly over his ribs.
Then the head lolled back on the pillow, the smile withdrawing from fox’s teeth into a glare of bronze stubble.
Prowse slept, and Eddie turned down the lamp, till the familiar smell of untrimmed wick filled the darkened room.
At night the dark grew suffocating in the felted rooms of the creaking cottage. The cries of the sleepers tormented him: Peggy Tyrrell for her rheumatics and her daughters, Don Prowse for God knew what — the war he hadn’t enlisted for, his dead brother, the failure of his marriage, Valda in her hat offering the good oil through the net.
On a certain night Eddie could no longer endure the manager’s mutterings, his farts, the metallic jingling of a bed the other side of a thin wall. He got up, thinking to spend the rest of the night by the cool of the river, but had hardly got the screen-door open when the voice intercepted him.