Disinterested Bystanders

'What was the last thing your wife said, Mr Dyson, before she went for her walk?'
      'I don't remember.'
      'Think about it.'
      'I'm sorry. My mind's a blank. Something trivial, I expect.'
      'Something trivial.'
      'Yes.'
      'But you don't remember.'
      'No.'
      'What time was this, when she went for her walk?'
      'Two, three. Something like that.'
      'Did you expect her to be gone long?'
      'I don't recall that I thought about it.'
      'What did you do while you were waiting for her?'
      'Nothing much. The usual things seaside tourists do, I suppose. Poked around in rock pools, had a nap.'
      'When did you become concerned?'
      'I can't say. When she didn't return I thought she must've come straight back here, to the cottage.'
      'Leaving you down there on the beach.'
      'Well, obviously I wasn't going to stay down there all night.'
      'What time did you come up?'
      'Fourish. When it started to turn cool.'
      'Were you concerned to find the cottage empty?'
      'Of course.'
      'When did you raise the alarm?'
      'Later. After it got dark. There's no phone here so I went along the lane to Kedgwick's place. I told him what happened. He said to call the police and stay by the phone. Then he went out. He was gone about an hour. I phoned my cousin in London too.'
      'Why did you wait until it got dark?'
      'What else could I do? Until then I had no real reason to think that she hadn't just gone for a long walk.'
      'Does your wife like walking, Mr Dyson? Do you walk in Australia?'
      'Not much.'
      'Has she ever done anything like this before?'
      'Like what?'
      'Disappeared.'
      'No. That is - well, no. Last August she was late coming home from a movie one night. But she phoned me. She'd seen some guy knifed in an alley. She was at the police station making a statement.'
      'How late was she then, before she phoned?'
      'I can't remember. Not so late that I was worrying. It was worse, actually, after she had phoned. I got panicky, don't ask me why. She was supposed to get a lift back but in the end I went and got her. She was a bit cranky about that.'
      'Really? Why?'
      'I'd left our son alone in bed. Asleep.'
      'How old is your son?'
      'Sixteen. Fifteen then.'
      'Has your wife any history of mental illness, Mr Dyson?'
      'No.'
      'This assault she witnessed last year. How did it affect her?'
      'She took it pretty well.'
      'She took it pretty well. You mean, as with the death of a favourite aunt or an old family pet. She was upset - but not unduly so.'
      'Not at the time, no.'

* * *

Later she heard the stories that were circulating about Dr Christie. They made her sick though she swore later that she'd never really believed them. They seemed quite innocuous at first; there was nothing about drugs or fraud or malpractice: Dr Christie, it was said, liked to make ribald comments about certain of his women patients when he was at parties or private social functions.
      Russell was undressing for bed when Jenna told him what she'd heard. She'd turned out the bedside lamps: the room was moonlit, he could just make out the shape of her head on the pillow.
      Neither of them knew Dr Christie. Before the assault they'd never heard of him. Russell had learned subsequently that he'd come from Northern Ireland a few years before, that he was divorced and that he had a son starting his first year at university.
      Someone who knew him described him as a quiet withdrawn man, and a more than competent GP. Russell told Jenna he couldn't believe, from what others had said of him, that Christie would be so indiscreet.
      'Indiscreet?' Jenna sounded aggrieved. 'Would you have said indiscreet if it were my breasts or the size of my vagina he was joking about at one of his sordid little parties?'
      'That's a subjective argument,' Russell said, climbing into bed. 'You don't expect me to answer that.'
      Jenna was silent for a while. Then she said, 'I don't feel right about him any more. I don't feel I can stand up in court and say with any conviction this man suffered at the hands of that man. How do I know Vince Burney didn't have a genuine grievance?'
      'Genuine grievance?' Russell snorted. 'To nearly kill a man?'
      'You're so certain,' Jenna said, 'because you weren't there. You have a picture in your head of what happened that never changes. Every time I close my eyes I see it again, but a little differently. Each time I hear a story about Vince Burney, or now Dr Christie, I wonder if I even know what I saw.'
      He was silent for a moment. He was thinking of an article he'd read in an English magazine about how women who took the witness stand were less likely to be believed than men. The view was, they tended to lie more often, have doubts. Misconstrue.
      He'd wondered if it was a peculiarly English attitude.
      He said tiredly, 'You know what you saw. You saw Vince Burney stick a knife into Dr Christie. This other business - what you dream, what you feel, what you wonder at - it's unimportant. The part that matters is the part you know the truth about. The rest is confusion.'


Once or twice they discussed the case with Rachel. She'd heard the rumours about Dr Christie and didn't care for them. She didn't care for the business at all, much.
      She'd heard stories about Vince Burney too, that he was a thief and a hooligan, that he'd robbed someone at knife point once before and got away with it.
      She knew Burney's mother slightly. 'A funny little woman with a squeaky voice,' she remarked one Sunday. 'I can never understand a word she says.'
      Mrs Burney worked in a school canteen.
      'Are they as clean as us?' Rachel wondered. 'I mean, handling food. You know how easily youngsters pick up germs.'
      She saw Jenna's stare and pretended she hadn't. She pulled a little handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it against her nose.
      'We had a black housekeeper when I was small,' Jenna remarked conversationally. 'I don't recall that we were ever poisoned.'
      Rachel smiled. 'You'd have a soft spot for them, wouldn't you, having one in your house.'
      'My father preached to them. Half his congregation were blacks. When they were singing it was as if the roof of the church was going to blow off.'
      'It was their hygiene rather than their religious beliefs I was concerned about,' Rachel said with a sniff. 'But I stand corrected, I'm sure.'


'Tell me about your housekeeper,' Russell said later. 'You've never mentioned her before.'
      'We had four or five different housekeepers,' Jenna said, 'and my father employed a part time secretary too for a while. They were all black. My favourite was called Tilly. She didn't stay long. I thought she was quite old but thinking about it now I guess she wasn't much over thirty. I was about twelve or thirteen then. She was fat and had a loud honking laugh. Her husband was like a little lecherous elf. He used to hang around for her after he'd left the pub. He'd come round the back of the house to the kitchen and if he thought no one was about he'd sneak up behind Tilly and put his hand up her dress. You knew when he was there because wherever you were in the house you'd hear that great snorting laugh of hers and then she'd yell out, "Hey Billy my man, get out of it!"
      'A neighbour of ours caught them making love in the park once, in a shelter. I heard him telling my father. 'Like dogs copulating in the street,' he said. Now I think about it, I don't know if he was referring to the position they were in or just their general behaviour. My father, I think, was mildly shocked. "What did you do?" he asked. And this neighbour - who could turn on a pretty phrase when he had a mind to - said, "Do, man? Do? What was there to do for a disinterested bystander?"'


She was turning back the bed covers, pulling her nightdress from under the cool sheet. Her face went suddenly white and she sat on the edge of the bed.
      'What's the matter?' he asked.
      She didn't answer.
      Sitting beside her, he said, 'I think we ought to get away next year, go overseas for a month or so.'
      She nodded. Then, without looking at him, she took hold of his hand and drew it between her legs.
      'Hey Billy my man get out of it,'
      she said with a little honking laugh.

* * *

A WPC brought some mugs of tea on a tray. She was young, plumpish and spoke with a thick regional burr. Russell liked her plain country face. She told him she had a cousin in Australia who organised camping trips to the outback. He lived in Adelaide.
      Her radio crackled unintelligibly for a few seconds and then went dead. She handed round the tea, dropping the tray carelessly on the floor beside the door. The detective sergeant, a gloomy red-faced man in his forties, leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The presence of the WPC seemed to annoy him. She was asking if he had ever fancied going to Australia himself. He drew quietly on his cigarette without answering. She asked him again, almost sternly.
      He said no.


They had been searching since daybreak. A small group had gathered outside the cottage just after dawn; police and coastguard officers, rubbing their hands, talking in low voices.
      Mr Kedgwick came along the lane and joined them. Cigarettes were lit, a flask opened and passed around. When they set out it was with an almost boyish air of determination, like a company of ramblers intent on a day's good walking.
      From the upstairs window Russell could see the mist rising from the gullies, the grass and tracks treacherous with dew. He waited for the day to warm as calmly as he waited for the milk to boil, the toast to brown.
      About nine he let himself into Mr Kedgwick's bungalow and phoned Godfrey again. When he put down the phone his hand was shaking. All night he had lain awake, marvelling at his sense of detachment. He was too numb to feel self-pity or fear. The unexpected still had the novelty of surprise.
      These tremors were something new, something inside him, a sickness, stopping his breath. He willed himself to stay calm.
      In the lane another police car was waiting.

* * *

'No, I don't blame myself, why should I? There was no warning that she was going to do anything silly, anything unexpected. You keep talking about her disappearance as if she's just wandered off into the blue. I don't believe it. If she'd wanted to go, she'd have gone earlier when she went into the sea. She could've just kept swimming, right on out of the bay. She's a strong swimmer. The cold didn't bother her. She could've swum right back to Australia if she'd wanted to. I could imagine her doing that - thinking that, if she was determined enough. If she was determined to just "disappear..."

'She's just like a little girl, really. That sounds patronising, doesn't it, but I don't think she's ever really grown up. She was eighteen when I met her, and a very young eighteen at that. She has this sensible front that she fools everyone with. She slips it on in the morning like a smart dress or a pair of decent shoes. All our friends think she's so level-headed, so... common-sensical. They have a blue with their partners and they come to her (they never come to me) and she dispenses all this wisdom, this fine common-sensical advice, and they go back to their partners and patch up their marriages. And Jenna comes to me and tells me about it, and titters like a little girl...

'Don't ask me about her childhood, I don't know anything about her childhood. Her father was a clergyman. I expect he beat her, or something. She doesn't like reminding...

'We came down here because of the riots. Godfrey - my cousin - was worried about Jenna. She was so frightened. We weren't really affected, of course, we weren't caught up in it in any way. But it was all around you - TV, on the radio, in the newspapers. We heard them one night, some mob chanting about a block away, near the Underground. I told Godfrey, you don't expect to hear of this sort of thing in England. According to Godfrey, there are only two issues that will bring an Englishman onto the streets: cruelty to animals and taxes. Jenna said, what about blacks..?

'He's a queer bird, Godfrey. Bit of an old woman, really. Well he's gay, actually. My father would've choked...

'These were the last pictures we took. Jenna hates being photographed, but she's hopeless handling the camera. This was near Downing Street. She will not face the camera. A woman was trampled by a horse just there. I saw it on the news. The camera zoomed right in on her. She was a bit of a mess. Jenna didn't like to think about it - being photographed there, I mean...

'Do you know what I think? Do you know what I think has happened to her? I think she's got lost in that rabbit warren of goat tracks and gullies that Kedgwick says stretch right along the coastline here. I took her into a maze once. It was in Melbourne, one of those grand colonial houses with an elaborately laid out garden. It was a quiet sort of day, hardly anyone else about. We went into the maze and then disagreed about the quickest way out. So we split up after making a bet on who would be out first. I was out in about five minutes. When she didn't appear I went back in and found her crouched in a corner, crying. She said, the minute she'd lost sight of me, she'd panicked. I said, why didn't you shout out? and she said she couldn't think, her mind had gone blank. I took her hand and led her out. We didn't make one wrong turn. I've got a good sense of direction, see. I always know where I'm going. I think Jenna spends too much time looking over her shoulder, to see where she's been.'

* * *

The first few days they were in London, still adjusting to the effects of their long flight, they didn't venture far. Godfrey recommended a quiet back street pub, close to the flat, where they could go for a meal at lunch time. It was a Victorian working man's pub with two saloon bars and a tiny snug barely big enough to take three small tables and a dozen chairs. There was a pane of frosted glass over the door, embossed with the words Ladies Parlour.
      They liked the little snug because it was quiet and dark and so English. There was a heater in the corner lulling them to sleep with the soft continuous hiss of burning gas. The room was empty apart from a small mousy looking woman of about fifty sitting close to the fire, reading a book.
      She was there the second day too: she looked up as they entered, nodded but didn't speak. Russell noticed she was reading a fat paperback edition of Bleak House. When they had eaten, this second day, he returned the plates to the saloon across the lobby (the snug was separate from the other bars) and stopped to chat with the proprietor for a few minutes. He told Russell that the woman with the copy of Bleak House was Australian too: she'd mentioned to him that she was from Queensland.
      When he returned to the snug Jenna was already talking to her. 'This is Hilary,' she said as he closed the door. 'She's from the Darling Downs. She's going home tomorrow.'
      Hilary smiled at him. He asked her to join them but she declined. Her voice was so soft and hesitant he was barely aware that she had spoken. She opened her book once more, lifted out a limp red page marker and wrapped it absently around her fingers.
      'Hilary's father died,' Jenna said quietly.
      Russell didn't say anything. Hilary was looking at him again. She glanced, a little resentfully, at Jenna and then explained in her small hesitant voice:
      'It was on Saturday. I haven't seen him for a long time, you see, not for years. They - my mother - phoned. She thought I should be there for the funeral. I was supposed to fly out on Monday.'
      She lowered her eyes again, staring at the pages of her book though it was evident her mind was on a landscape far from Dickens' London.
      Russell asked when the funeral was.
      'Tomorrow,' she said. She looked up quickly. 'I didn't want to be there, not for the burial. Not after so long.'
      'I expect they'll understand,' Russell said, 'your family.' He didn't know what else to say. She seemed a bit simple-minded but it must have been the shock, the surprise: it might have been the expectations of others that she couldn't handle.
      She shifted slightly in her chair. Russell noticed she had a sight impediment, a squint which made it look as if she were staring over his shoulder, observing a little etching on the wall behind him. He noticed too she seemed more comfortable addressing Jenna than she did him.
      'I've been living in Gloucestershire,' she announced suddenly, almost cheerfully. 'With a friend.'
      Later he went to the toilet and when he returned she had closed her book and was getting ready to leave. She gave Russell a sidelong glance as she passed and whispered to Jenna, 'You won't forget, will you?'
      'Forget what?' he asked when the woman had gone.
      Jenna explained that Hilary wanted to have afternoon tea with her. She mentioned a little cafe close by called Rooks and Swallows. Russell remembered they'd passed it on the way from Godfrey's flat. There were three or four plastic tables on the pavement under the front awning in the continental fashion, though it was much too cold for anyone to sit outside.
      'Will you go?' he asked. He felt absurdly put out, excluded. Jenna shrugged.
      'Of course. What else can I do? She only wants to talk. She said we're the first Australians she's spoken to in years.'
      'She's going to give you a sad story,' he said. 'You'd better leave your purse in the flat.


Waiting for Jenna to return from the cafe he poured himself a glass of beer and sat in front of the TV to watch the news. Godfrey hadn't come home. Russell thought he may have been at a club, or at the cinema: sometimes he dined out with one of his friends or associates. They were never advised of Godfrey's movements and they learned never to ask. In those early days Godfrey seemed to come and go as if he were the visitor and they the tenants. It was not a situation they liked much.
      Images of civil unrest flickered across the TV screen: strikes, scuffles with police, random acts of violence, all far away in the huge industrial cities to the north. He switched channels for a re-run of I Love Lucy. Switching back, he caught a politician in a sober double-breasted suit talking frankly about an affair with his secretary. She was expecting a baby in August.
      There were no reports from Australia: Hilary's father, waiting to be buried in a distant autumnal Tablelands town, was not pressing international news.


It was dark when Jenna returned. She couldn't face any food; she'd been eating scones and home made fruit cake and drinking endless cups of tea. She slumped on the sofa, subdued, a part of her lingering still in the cafe with Hilary. Russell gave her a Scotch.
      'Was it money?' he asked.
      'No.' She straightened up a little and kicked off her shoes. 'I think she's quite well off, actually. She lives with a lawyer.'
      'The friend in Gloucestershire.'
      'Yes.'
      'A bloke.'
      'Did you think it was a woman?'
      He shrugged. He hadn't thought about it one way or the other. 'What did she want then? Just to bend your ear?'
      'She talked about her childhood. She left Australia when she was twenty-one and hasn't been back in almost thirty years.'
      'I see,' he said
      Jenna smiled superiorly. 'What do you see?'
      'It's to do with her father, isn't it. Was he a monster?'
      'Why do you say that?'
      'Well, she's stayed away all these years. She doesn't want to be there for the funeral. It's obvious. She's afraid of him. Even when he's dead.'
      Jenna didn't say anything. She kept taking tiny sips of her Scotch as if the taste was new to her, as if she didn't really like it.
      'Go on,' Russell said. 'Tell me about it. I know you're dying to.'


It seemed Hilary had almost gone home a number of times. She'd made the arrangements, even bought the tickets once and then at the last moment refused to go. It was herself she refused, not others. All the years she'd been in England there had never been any pressure on her to return to Australia (until now); no one ever wrote angry letters complaining of her absence or her waywardness, even of her unorthodox relationships (though she knew there were mutterings at home).
      Once a month, on the first Sunday, she wrote a three page letter to her mother. It was her mother (whose name was Constance) whom she missed the most - still missed, even after almost thirty years, though of course the woman she remembered was not as old as Hilary was now. Memories were like photographs, Hilary said, moments in time caught in the blink of an eye and never changing.
      Hilary had always felt her Australian childhood to be an unnatural one, an accident of place. Her mother's family were Gloucestershire people, and Constance had left the county herself for Australia as a young woman and never returned. 'Coming to England was my true homecoming,' Hilary maintained. She would say to people - who never knew whether to laugh or not - 'I'm a cool climate person; warm-blooded, you see.'
      When she was small, her mother used to tell her stories about her own English childhood. They were still fresh in her mind then though Hilary noticed that sometimes the same stories had different endings or involved different members of the family. Constance's parents had both died before she sailed for Australia but for some years she kept up a correspondence with several aunts and cousins. Then, one by one, they died, or were married and moved away, or simply lost interest. When Hilary left for England she took with her little more than her mother's memories: there were no names to contact, no addresses of any real use; she was visiting a landscape of the past, a photograph of a different age, peopled by a different generation.
      In someone else the arrival might have been a crushing disappointment: for Hilary, it was a revelation. She had discovered a homeland, somewhere that gave her a sense of place, of belonging. Thereafter she commonly referred to Australia as, 'the country of my father', speaking always in a slightly disapproving tone as if the 'flight to England' she liked to talk of had been less a leave taking than a desperate escape.
      Sometimes, telling people the story of her life, Hilary could see by the way they were looking at her, that they thought she was leaving something out. They were thinking there must have been a lover, a childhood sweetheart perhaps, tragically killed. Or possibly it was an unwanted baby, forcibly given up for adoption.
      Some people, Hilary would say, liked to invent lives for others that in their younger days they would have dreamily imagined for themselves.


'This is all very interesting,' Russell said, a little impatiently, 'but what about the old man? That's what it's all about, isn't it, the father?'
      'Don't interrupt,' Jenna said. 'I'm coming to him.' She held out her glass. 'Get me another drink.'
      He reached for the bottle of Scotch.
      'He abused her, didn't he,' he said. 'That's where all this is leading. I can see it coming.'
      Jenna looked angry. 'Must you sound so smug about it?'
      'But I'm right, aren't I. Tell me I'm right.'
      'Whether you're right or wrong, it's not the point. It's your attitude - off-hand, dismissive. It doesn't touch you, you think you can afford to be flippant.'
      He stared at her. 'How can you say that? I'm just keeping my distance, keeping my perspective. It's Hilary's story yet you tell it as if it were your own.'
      'How do you want me to tell it?' Jenna asked tensely. 'As if I'd just read it in the paper?'
      He was silent for a moment. He was thinking of the night of Dr Christie's assault and how she had seemed so removed from it afterwards.
      'I just don't understand your interest in the woman,' he said. 'How do you know she's telling you the truth, anyway?'
      'About what?'
      'About being abused as a child.'
      'I didn't say she had been abused as a child. You did.'
      'But it's what she told you, isn't it. I just find it a bit hard to swallow, that's all. I mean, why should she tell you, a complete stranger? And this fairy tale about an English homeland. It's a bit precious, don't you think?'
      Jenna lowered her eyes. 'I don't know.'
      'I'd like to hear her father's side of the story,' he said, 'assuming there's some truth in it. All these years, who knows, he may have been regretting some casual gesture, something unexpected perhaps. A touch or a kiss...'
      'Children don't misunderstand those things,' Jenna argued. 'They know what's given in love and what isn't.'
      'Not if it's out of character. Fathers who have trouble expressing themselves tend to blunder, go over the top, or do something silly. It's all perfectly innocent.'
      'Nothing fathers do to their children is ever entirely innocent,' Jenna said.


Hilary's father was a retired Army officer. He returned to the small Darling Downs community after the war and bought a half share in a motor repair business with his cousin. The cousin was a genius on the shop floor but drank heavily. One day in 1950 he fell into a flooded storm drain on the way home from the pub and was drowned. Thereafter Hilary's father ran the business on his own.
      He was an astute man, hired good staff, and the business prospered. The people in the town liked and respected him because he had spent the last year of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. They called him the duke, an ironic reference to his English wife who sounded like the actress Edith Evans in a movie someone had seen about the British ruling class.
      Hilary's father was a tall stringy man with a slight limp. He would never say what caused the limp though everyone knew it resulted from his experience as a POW. Another outcome of the year spent in captivity was a deep religious conviction. 'Suffering made me believe,' he would tell people. 'Not my own - which was nothing - but seeing others'.' He was a popular reader of Biblical texts at evening classes held at the School of Arts. Later he travelled to the more isolated communities in the outlying districts and read the Sunday Service.
      There were two children; Hilary, the elder, and a son who died of leukaemia at the age of seven. For a long time after the death Hilary's father couldn't bear to hear his son's name mentioned. He insisted his wife dispose of all the boy's clothes and toys, even his simple drawings and paintings. He wanted nothing in the house to remind him of his son's existence. Wisely, his wife hid the photographs that included the boy: for this he was thankful later, though it was a long time before he could properly look at them.
      The boy's room, a boxed in section of the verandah, he stripped bare, then furnished with a desk, bookcases and two easy chairs. It became his retreat, where he could write his sermons and select his reading texts away from the household chatter of his wife and daughter.
      The death of his son did nothing to diminish the father's faith, but it changed him in other ways. He became remote and difficult to talk to. When he laughed, someone said, he sounded like a travelling salesman laughing at a smutty joke.
      One day, when Hilary was returning from school, she heard her parents arguing in the kitchen. She went to the back window to listen. She didn't know what the argument was about but her mother's voice was brittle and complaining. It seemed she had been weeping. She told her husband she couldn't bear to be touched by him ever again: it was like being mauled by a stranger.
      Hilary could see her father's shadow through the curtain. For a long while he didn't move or say anything. Then her mother began sobbing again and he went away and shut himself in his room.


Jenna was silent. Her eyes were closed and her head was drooping as if she were nodding off to sleep. Russell leaned forward and took the glass of Scotch out of her hand.
      She looked at him.
      'Have you been listening?'
      'Of course I have. You're the one who seems to be dozing off.'
      'I just closed my eyes for a second. I wanted to picture it. When she was telling me, it was as if I was there. It was as if I was the one listening at the window.'
      'You're too impressionable,' he said.
      She smiled, almost regretfully, and reached over for her glass of Scotch.
      'You wouldn't have said that a year ago.'


When she was sixteen Hilary became friendly with a young Indian woman called Lila. Lila's husband, Mr Dass, was employed as a cleaner at the motor repair business that Hilary's father owned. The business by this time employed more than a dozen men. Hilary's father knew each by his first name with the exception of Mr Dass. Mr Dass was only ever Mr Dass.
      Lila was twenty-one the first time she came to Hilary's house. Mr Dass was much older and people who saw them together often mistook them for father and daughter. They had a young son whose name Hilary had long forgotten. Later they had another son whose name was Prakash. Years after, Hilary's mother sent a newspaper cutting showing a tall athletic looking Prakash standing with his mother at a graduation ceremony. There was no mention of Mr Dass.
      Lila was a bright studious young woman who had learned to type before she got married. She wasn't very pretty but she had a nice figure which Hilary admired. Hilary was dumpy at sixteen and hated herself.
      One Sunday afternoon, just after lunch, Lila came to the house. Hilary answered the door. Lila was going to do some typing for Hilary's father. He had been asked by the Bishop to write a little history of the church and the town and the families who had lived and farmed there for almost a hundred years. He had refused at first, thinking there were others better able, but the Bishop was persuasive. So he talked to the old-timers, made notes from the Parish records, and once or twice drove into Toowoomba to read the old newspapers in the public library.
      The little book began to take shape.
      When Mr Dass heard of the work he went to Hilary's father and offered to have it typed for him, free of charge. It was necessary, Mr Dass said, for Lila to keep her hand in. And she had her own typewriter, a little portable machine in a simulated leather case.
      That first afternoon, Lila spent about three hours typing up notes and rough drafts and helping Hilary's father sort through the photographs that were to illustrate the book. Afterwards she sat on the verandah with Hilary and drank a glass of lemonade. Hilary remembered the day with a particular clarity: it was September, unseasonably warm after a dry winter and the garden was filled with the heady smell of native flowers in early bloom.
      Before she went home, Lila told Hilary she hoped they would see more of each other. Lila didn't have many friends. She and Mr Dass and the baby had come from the coast about a year before and were still trying to settle in.
      Each Sunday afternoon thereafter, Lila came to the house to help Hilary's father with his book. They always repaired to the study that had been the boy's room, and Hilary's father closed the door. He didn't want Lila distracted by Hilary loitering on the verandah, pretending to read a novel. When the days grew hot he brought a large pedestal fan from the workshop and set it up behind the door where it whirred away noisily and sent tremors across the floor and through the walls, causing the crockery along the kitchen shelves to rattle.
      There were no proper windows to the study: the verandah had been boxed in with sheets of masonite and louvres of frosted glass. The louvres faced south to the neglected rear of the garden, the cats' hunting ground. The prospect was further obscured by a large corrugated iron water tank, overgrown with grape vines. Hilary could remember hiding under the tank stand when she was small and had misbehaved.
      Lila always stayed a while after her visits, sometimes just for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour or more. Hilary's mother occasionally asked her to stay for tea but Lila always declined. She liked just to walk in the wild back garden with her friend Hilary. One day, not long before Christmas, they stopped to pick a few mean grapes from around the water tank.
      Lila was silent.
      Hilary, her mouth full of shrivelled fruit, stepped up to the louvre window and peered into her father's empty study. The louvres were shut but there was a thin opening where the strips of glass and the frame didn't come together properly.
      'You should ask Dad to open these up,' Hilary said. 'It's so stuffy in that room unless the breeze comes up from the south.'
      'He doesn't like to,' Lila said. 'He says there are snakes in the trees and they can come through the window.'
      Hilary stepped back, smirking at her father's whimsy. Lila was nervously fingering the buttons of her dress. Then she said secretly, 'You could come and watch us if you wanted to. If you can see in.'
      Hilary's father liked to take a walk and stretch his legs after he and Lila had finished for the day. Hilary listened for the sound of his feet on the drive while she considered Lila's strange suggestion.
      'Why should I do that?' she asked.
      'He touches me,' Lila said. She rested her long dark fingers lightly across her chest. 'I want you to see.'
      Hilary blinked. She couldn't imagine her father's great paws caressing Lila's little pointy breasts.
      'Does he unbutton your dress?' she asked matter-of-factly.
      Lila shook her head. Her eyes had grown large and childlike with silent pleading. Hilary felt suddenly afraid.
      'You must tell Mr Dass what you see,' Lila said. 'My husband will know what to do.'


All week Hilary was troubled. She had strange dreams in which her father kept following her around the house, coming into her bedroom when she was reading, and once, opening the bathroom door when she was having a shower. She knew it was wrong, that it was Lila her father wanted, but Lila was never there. One night Mr Dass appeared in her dreams, dressed in a neat blue suit, and carrying Lila's typewriter. When Hilary unzipped the cover a small green snake slithered out and curled itself around her ankle.
      Hilary saw little of her father that week, and was glad. She felt uncomfortable being in the room alone with him. She couldn't help looking at his hands, the hands she imagined sliding around Lila's tiny waist and fondling her through her dress.
      She wondered if he said anything, made some little animal noise while he was touching her: Lila hadn't said. If it had been winter Lila could have worn a thick sweater or a coat and said she was cold. If Lila had been born in India where it was hot every day and not at the coast near Coffs Harbour, she could have complained of the fan, saying it was giving her a chill.
      Hilary wondered what she would have done if she were in Lila's place.
      'Why didn't you just tell him to stop it?' she had asked when they were standing by the tank stand.
      'I did,' Lila said. 'He just laughed and said, "Silly girl."'
      Hilary waited feverishly for the long week to end.
      Sometimes she looked at her mother and pitied her. If her mother caught her watching she would smile and say, 'What's up, Dumps?' (Hilary hated being called Dumps. Her mother seemed to think she was still a little girl.)
      'What's up, Dumps?' her mother said again just before Lila arrived.
      Hilary, nervous and sulky, stared at her shoes, and said nothing.


Crouching by the tank stand, Hilary got cramp. She had positioned herself earlier, before her father and Lila had begun work. She was afraid to move in case she was heard. It was cooler than usual, the sky overcast; there was no need in the study for the noisy fan.
      Every time her father turned towards the window, Hilary started, certain that her head bobbing quickly down and then up behind the frosted glass would catch his attention. Then a tiny lizard ran over her foot and she nearly cried out.
      Lila was working at the typewriter, saying little. Hilary's father moved about the room, sorting his papers, thinking out loud. Occasionally he stopped Lila at her work to explain something to her. Twice he came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, but nothing happened.
      Hilary's cramp grew painful. She wanted this silly game to end so that she could go away and rub her legs, and breath properly again. She was ready to give up. And then, when the moment came, it seemed so natural she almost overlooked it. Her father, leaning over Lila's shoulder, had slipped his hand under her arm and was gently massaging her left breast. His face was oddly without expression, as if his head was quite ignorant of his hand's deviation.
      Lila had stopped typing. She looked up, looked at the little crack between the louvre glass and the frame where Hilary's round unblinking eye was witnessing everything.
      Afterwards, Lila asked quickly, 'Did you see?'
      'Yes,' Hilary said, a little breathless.
      'Then you must come and tell Mr Dass. Now, please.'


Hilary hadn't prepared herself for this. It wasn't that she had forgotten what was expected of her, but she felt that just seeing was enough for one day. Lila was adamant. She wanted Mr Dass to know the disgusting thing his employer had done to her. 'I would confess it to him myself,' she told Hilary as they walked slowly (but not slowly enough for Hilary) across town, 'but Mr Dass may disbelieve me. I said to him, you see, I thought I should be paid a little something for my work, and that made him very angry. Mr Dass thinks highly of your father. He will believe you because you are his daughter.'
      Hilary wondered if Mr Dass would still think highly of her father when he had heard what she had to say - and if he no longer did, what worth would he put on her story? But Lila was untroubled by such conundrums. 'Mr Dass will know the truth,' she said. 'He will think, how could you imagine such a thing of your own father?'
      When they arrived at the Dass house Lila took her young son into the garden. Hilary was invited into the sitting room and given a glass of lime cordial to slake her thirst. Her mouth was unutterably dry. Mr Dass was polite but distant. He listened carefully to everything she told him, and then smiled.
      'You are very naughty to tell such tales,' he said. 'What would your father say if he heard you? He would give you a good thrashing, I think.'
      'But it's true!' Hilary said hotly. 'I was watching!'
      'It is titillating nonsense,' Mr Dass said. 'Young ladies minds are full of it. It is these romantic books and magazines you read. I have told Lila, she has a young baby, she should behave like a woman, but all the time she talks like a silly schoolgirl.'
      Mr Dass continued smiling. He had not raised his voice or moved his arms or his legs since Hilary had begun telling her story. He kept his hands clasped loosely in his lap, and every now and again, just to emphasise some small point, he would lift his thumbs, stand them apart for a few seconds, and then bring them together again.
      Unable to look Mr Dass in the eye, Hilary concentrated on his stubby little thumbs instead.
      'I am thinking,' Mr Dass went on, 'Lila has put you up to this. I cannot believe you would invent such a tale. I know Lila, she will do anything to get out of typewriting. She is idle and good for nothing except having babies.'
      Hilary crouched in her chair. She knew she was going to cry, and she didn't want Mr Dass to see. Across the room, Mr Dass looked on a head hung in penitent shame. His voice, never sharp, softened appreciably.
      'I will of course say nothing of this to your father. It is just a girlish prank.'
      'I think I should go home now,' Hilary said, rising.
      'That is an excellent idea,' Mr Dass said evenly.
      He followed her a little way to the door. As Hilary was hurrying down the passage he called after her, 'Will you tell Lila I am wanting her, please.'
      Hilary didn't wait to see Lila. She walked down the garden path with its rows of pretty flowers either side, and onto the street. But Lila had left the sanctuary of the garden and was looking out for her at the end of the block. She had the grizzling boy in her arms. Seeing Hilary's screwed up face her eyes grew round with fear.
      'Oh what happened?' she cried. 'Tell me what happened?'
      'He smiled at me,' Hilary sobbed, running past. 'He just smiled and smiled.'


Russell listened till the end. Jenna didn't say anything when she had finished but got up and took her empty glass into the kitchen. She called out that she was tired and that she wanted to go to bed. He went into the kitchen and held onto her.
      A siren sounded in the street below. Later they got used to them, learned to recognise which was an ambulance, which a police car or a fire engine.
      'I was wrong then,' he said, breathing softly into Jenna's hair. 'At least, I wasn't entirely right.'
      Jenna didn't say anything.
      'Who do you think she was escaping from?' he asked. 'Her father? Or the disbelieving Mr Dass?'
      'Her father, of course,' Jenna said with a little impatient sigh. 'But it was because of Mr Dass she stayed away. Until it was too late to go back anyway.'
      She became restless and he let her slip from his embrace. She went to the sink and filled her empty glass with cold water. Presently she said - tentatively, as if she were questioning herself - 'I don't really understand what she wanted of me.'
      'She got a hearing,' he said. 'Leave it at that.'
      Jenna turned and regarded him closely for a moment.
      'What did you mean just now when you said you were wrong?'
      He counted the ways a child or a young woman could be abused, and changed his mind. But it seemed futile to pursue it.
      'It wasn't a sad story after all,' he said with a foolish grin. 'It was a funny one.'
      'Only for Mr Dass,' Jenna said coldly.
      'It's in the past,' he said, becoming short. 'It happened somewhere else, to other people. Why let it get to you?'
      'It could be any childhood story,' Jenna insisted. 'Beginning in trust and ending in humiliation.'
      Russell started laughing, she was so earnest, and then realised, too late, that Hilary's story may well have triggered memories of some violence in her own childhood. He thought uncomfortably of her father, the Tablelands pastor, rarely spoken of, largely forgotten, he had always thought, without a tinge of regret.
      Perhaps he should have said something, then when the moment seemed right. But it was late, Jenna was tired; and it was folly, surely, to raise the dead when the wounds they had inflicted so long ago were still suppurating.

* * *

At the end of the day, a sort of peace. Standing on the back step, eating an apple; the air perfectly still: voices drifting up from the quay below.
      '...night, Col..'
      '...bad luck, eh..?'
      '...first thing in the morning...'
      '...how's Peg..?'
      '...Jeez...'
      '...fancy a pint..?'
      '...night, Tom...'
      '...near freezing, last night...'
      '...night...'
      '...night...'
      And so many lights: small cars edging past each other in the narrow lanes; the last flashlight beams zig-zagging across the headlands; a pale northern moon, a myriad vagrant stars.
      And a man picking his way up the footpath, swinging a lamp.


'Come and have a beer,' Mr Kedgwick said, 'and a bite of grub.'
      'No. Thanks.'
      'No good sitting in here moping on your own.'
      'I'm all right. I'm quite calm.'
      'It'll not have hit you yet. Last night there was a chance, maybe...'
      'There's still a chance,' Russell said. 'There's more than a chance.'
      Mr Kedgwick shook his head, ponderously, hardened against hope.
      'As like as not she's dead, man. You'll have to face it.'
      Russell looked into his eyes and saw, as if through binoculars, a corpse floating on a flat green sea.
      'Not yet,' he said.


Later he would clear the table, shower, lay out warm clothes for the morning. The weather was on the change. He set a fire hissing through damp twigs in the grate. When the wind rose it caused the flames to leap and dance, and the curtains to billow from the sills where the windows had aged and twisted away from the frames.
      On a whim he went upstairs again and opened the suitcases. He let his fingers settle on her soft woollen jumpers. He unrolled her stockings, scattered her skirts and underwear across the bed. He had this need to hold onto her, to kiss her, to have the taste of her perfume in his mouth.
      He went downstairs and she was sitting near the fire, warming her hands. As he entered the room she moved her head a little and a thin ribbon of fire leapt across the hearth to lick at her feet. He knelt beside her and took hold of her hands which were hot and blistered from crawling through brambles and over ancient walls of loose crumbling stone.
      Neither of them spoke. The fire died down and the cold sent icy fingers across his back. And the flame held in the curve of his hand burned and went out.

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The Lizard | Panatellas | A View of the Mechanics Institute | Disinterested Bystanders | The Finding of Solitude | Unfinished Business | Table of Contents