Gatherers and Hunters Page 10

  ‘You will have wine yes?’ Andor snapped his fingers. ‘But for you, our honoured guest, the very best, the most special,’ and he murmured to the host, that stocky old man who appeared immediately at Andor’s beckoning.

  ‘My good Australian friend, you are lucky,’ he said with his solicitous gleam, a gleam I was beginning to have suspicions of, as I kept shovelling the pile of mushrooms. ‘You will not appreciate your luck. Tonight is the night of broaching the new season’s wine and as the first special guest on this special night, you have the great honour of tasting the first wine from the new cask. Of blessing it, in fact. There are only one hundred and fifty casks of this special chablis, it comes from the grapes of the Valley of the Martyrs, which we drove through as we came here.’

  I knew I was being foolish, of inviting untoward, or politically dangerous confidences. ‘What martyrs were these?’

  Andor chortled, a strangely boyish sound, more like a hoot than a chuckle. ‘Ah, my friend, already I see you imagining the qualities of this special chablis to come from the buried remains of our celebrated martyrs. Alas, dear friend, a poetic thought, but not really practical. Those martyrs were four hundred years ago. We would have to fertilise the field with fresh crops of martyrs to maintain the quality of the crop, if that were so. Every year, a new crop of martyrs to be buried. I think our wine draws its flavour from less precious sources. You like the flavour? You must drink more of this.’ He held his glass to the candlelight. ‘We are most honoured.’

  I think I had finished the full plate of mushrooms. I think I had drunk perhaps three capacious glasses of the white slightly fizzy wine. I think I might even have offered to sing a stanza of ‘Moreton Bay’ if the musicians would accompany me (I was sufficiently cunning to realise such a request was outside their repertoire). I believe I was mopping my lips with the thick, starchy serviette when Andor’s sister suddenly appeared before us.

  ‘You have neglected me. You have humiliated me. You have left me in Ljubljana without my car, and you have been entertaining our Australian guest all this time, you have been eating him up, you seek to destroy me.’

  Her English accent was wonderful, full vowels, every consonant precise, each inflection accurate as a good recording. My first words, spoken with a rush of apology, sounded, even to me, broad and gratingly ocker.

  ‘Forgive Andor. Please. He has been a beaut host and we have seen some pretty amazing places …’

  ‘So. And you are the distinguished professor, what is your name? Never mind, I am here now and you will make conversation while I catch up with you. Andor, you will order the baby-lip mushrooms for me immediately, it is the least you can do.’

  Her brother was suddenly abject.

  She was stunningly beautiful, and her name was Irene.

  She smiled with a sudden change of facial expression as the formal introductions were completed. Her eyes were ­enormous, and made more so through obviously sophisticated use of subtle cosmetic enhancement. Her teeth were beautifully, wonderfully even, white and generous in her full-lipped mouth. They were, indeed, magnetic. I could not keep my eyes from them. Perhaps it was the contrast to her brother’s unrepentant natural mouthful. Even her little pointy eye-teeth were still intact and, just like my ­daughter’s, pushed slightly into prominence by the neighbouring ­incisors. My own dentist had, usefully, recommended that my Sarah’s eye-teeth be extracted to allow the others that extra space. The result had been very successful. Irene might regret allowing her mouth to crowd out with everything that nature had provided. She smiled at me, and directed her attention fully in my direction.

  ‘But what is this you have, professor? Surely this is not the first chablis of the season, and from the Martyr’s vineyard? I see why you have both been sequestered without me, enjoying such a special privilege. You will not object if I take just a sip from your glass, Professor? Before my slothful brother thinks to order me my own serving?’

  The act of savouring a wine can be a process of finest privilege. Irene knew all the subtleties and as she finished the rest of my glass her satisfaction was enormous, a reward in itself. She licked her lips, and then smiled to me again.

  ‘You know the legend of this wine, my new friend? It is called the Eyes of the Martyrs. That is a beautiful name, is it not? The white chablis grapes it is made from, they are like beautiful eyeballs, and this wine is truly special. It is grown in the ancient Field of the Martyrs. They say it is because of their bones that this wine has its special magic. You find it a unique wine, surely? There is nothing like it in all of Slovenia, all of Yugoslavia. You have drunk the eyes of the martyrs.’

  Her brother did not correct her, or mention our earlier conversation. Irene had become the centre of a sort of whirlpool of activity by now, and everyone – the staff, the singers, even other patrons – seemed to be caught up in her dramatic and perhaps imperious performance. She may well have been an actor, and famous in this area: it was that sort of presence and projection.

  Later events became blurred, no doubt it was the fresh wine which by this stage might well have been fermented from the eyeballs of ancient martyrs – or, as I seem to recall Andor maliciously whispering to me as an aside, from other sorts of martyr’s balls, if it came to that. It is true, the evening seemed to be degenerating into something more ribald and full of secret winks, leers, whispers and suggestions. One of the Austrian Tyrolean dancers, I do recall, divested herself of her white blouse and I remarked, too appreciatively it seems in retrospect, at the wonderful milky whiteness of her breasts and the almost indecent pallor of her nipples. ‘She must surely still be a virgin, to stay like that.’ I think I even tittered. I know I imagined, at that moment, Irene with broad aureoles of almost chocolate brown and erect nipples strong as buttons. I do not think these thoughts were expressed in words at that stage. But they certainly floated in the air. I felt myself almost floating. I cannot even remember if the fourth member of our party turned up, though there is a blurred image of long tawny hair swirling, near my face. And those buoyant white breasts.

  The darker fairy tales were certainly more and more in my thoughts, as the night wore on and the events of the afternoon blurred with the bubble of more wine glasses and the giddy effect, I was realising, of those magical mushrooms.

  If I was a bear in the woods, and Irene was an all too knowing Red Riding Hood or other pantomime princess, her brother was turning into all the other dark background figures of the scenario: the neglectful father, the sullen brother, the silent woodman, the vampire servant. And that shadowy later presence: another vampire agent?

  Wait. Have I given too much away? Have I fancified it all just that much excessively? There had been talk of lynxes released into their old genetic hungers – or their feral futures. There had been, certainly, the waterfall and the source of the Sava, and striking enough it had been. More than striking, face up to it: it was damned nerve-wracking, a much more intimate and threatening sort of presence than Uluru or the Olgas. I was, myself, involved, not excluded.

  And there had been the appearance of Irene, with her needle teeth that seemed to grow longer and longer as the night progressed. She ate her mushrooms with wolfish urgency, noisily, slurping and licking her lips. She even (I am sure I do remember this) lifted the plate at the end and licked it all over. She grinned then at me, as if to instruct me to do the same. Everyone was doing the same. The bare-breasted redhead was leaning over her plate to lap its last gravy.

  The girl with the blouse; the girl without the blouse. If I think very carefully I am sure I recall, also, the host drawing down a long whip from the rafters and cracking it like a stockman to the rhythm of the accordionist. Did I try to explain stockwhip competitions then? And dare I remember that I did try to unleash the rain-after-drought ‘national joke’? But by this stage there was a swirl of activity around me, and dancing, and the close proximity of bodies, many bodies. And animal cries, gruntings, farmyard laughter and smells and jostling activity, think of it all as a swi
rl, a vortex dragging the whole night into its centre.

  I woke up. It was full morning. I was lying on an unmade bed and realised it was the hotel I had been booked into from Belgrade. It had all the sensations that waking up alone in an hotel room instantly impose on us.

  I remember what roused me was a sensation of strong itching. I woke up scratching my neck. As soon as I realised this I dragged my fingernails away. They were bloodmarked. I staggered then to the bathroom with its fussy Austrian sort of decor, and stared at my neck and throat.

  There were several marks – four of them – and I had been scratching at these. I realised, immediately, that these must have been from bedbugs. I had once before, in Paris, experienced bedbugs and they made an unerring line for my neck and my throat. It must have been my own fingernails that had torn their little welts into lacerations, rather deep ones. And of course it was coincidence that determined these were spaced around my throat like two pairs of vampire incisors.

  Bank Closure

  Everyone saw it coming, but that did not lessen the small shock when the initial phone call came, followed by the formal letter with its proffered regrets and the terminology of rationalisation, which is another word for rationing. Rationing is something Bernard just remembered from the Second World War and after, when he was still a small kid. Rationing meant regulations and queues and going without. Sugar rationing was what he remembered, and the time he was almost scalped by his mother because of the experiment he and Beverley-over-the-road had been doing with homemade lollies. The lollies were a failure, the sugar was wasted – he still remembered his mother scraping crunchy remnants off the kitchen floor and swearing, actually swearing. Beverley was barred from the kitchen.

  He had spent a great deal of his time rationing, if you think of it. Rationing, not rationalising. There was that period in secondary school when he undertook a long regime of rationing the aniseed balls. He cannot remember why, now, aniseed balls so obsessed him, but he collected them in their hundreds. He stored them under his bed in old Vegemite bottles. And he rationed them out to himself, one at a time, no more than three a day. There were only two of his friends who were ever allowed one aniseed ball from his store. They were Bill and Kenneth, and they swapped precious Malay States stamps for them. Even then Bernard was a sort of banker. When his father took him to the Commonwealth the first time, he was fascinated by the tellers, doling out coins and paper money.

  Why aniseed balls? That’s too far back even to worry himself with. It was a phase. Like the later decision to ration the number of times a year he allowed himself to go to the pictures. A year. Not a month or a week: even then he had a sense for the breath-span, as it were, of financial accountability.

  Later, it was not really surprising that he rationed the number of hours his own kids were allowed to watch TV. Even last year he had noted – or Jean had drawn it to his attention – that instinctively he had rationed the number of minutes he permitted himself to read the morning newspaper. She had timed him. At five past eight, after the ABC news, until fourteen minutes past eight. Bernard scanned the news like clockwork. Even if he had not reached past page three he would fold the paper (four squares) and give one of his little hrrrrmphs, and reach for the car keys. His official day had begun.

  What on earth would he do once he had been forced into retirement? The prospect now stared him in the face and had done so since that friendly phone call. He had thought to avoid all the tension and pressure of competition and wrangling for position when he had volunteered to manage the Cunningham branch. He had no ambitions for Head Office or even one of the larger centres. Cunningham was a small town but when he moved there it was one of the quiet little money earners. A number of small but profitable mines had their offices in the town, and there were the woollen mills and the butter factory, whose brand name was known throughout South East Queensland. The rich alluvial flats were first recognised by the explorer Logan, and most of the farmers in the district now had contracts with Heinz. A tidy little town, and the small but flourishing shopping centre reflected that. The year Bernard came in to manage the Commercial Bank of Australia, Cunningham was named Tidy Town of the Year.

  After the Bank of New South Wales takeover Bernard retained his position, and his unwillingness to move was acknowledged. The branch maintained strong business, and because the CBA was in there first, it had local loyalties. Not even the Commonwealth had taken a foothold, and the Wales had always been only a sub agency. Well, that takeover was a ‘rationalisation’ if you like, but despite the name change all the old customers agreed it was only a surface thing. Old Fred Morrow had bought up six large chequebooks so that he could continue using the old bank name – Commercial, the proper name – in perpetuity. Or at least until he worked his way through them, which they both calculated would be four years. Good old Fred.

  Bernard was one of the ones who had lobbied against the name change to Westpac. Perhaps that had been, secretly, when all the rot started and the inspectors grew less accommodating. But he had kept his ear to the ground and he was darned sure that Westpac would never stick. He lost the Ward account to the Commonwealth in the first month. Then all the Schinkler family accounts, the whole eighteen of them. In a small town, that hurts.

  But nobody was to know the stranglehold of ‘rationalisation’, which had now come to mean, in the district, today, simply the drain to Head Office, down to the City. It had begun almost imperceptibly, perhaps because all the mines closed down one by one. Pit mining had become uneconomical and the State Government was giving concessions to open cut operations and their Japanese contracts. Then who would have believed the woollen mills would ever close? They had been exporting good quality stuff to markets around the world, it was boasted, though their domestic blanket brand was the stuff of their existence. Nobody foresaw the rise of the doona. Or the cutting of trade tariffs. That was the first nail in the coffin. Even the two real estate agents began to feel the pinch then.

  A too depressing story. Bernard had survived it all, and some of the recent foreclosures had really distressed him. How could he face old Terry Maloney at the bowls club any more? He gave up competition bowling. He nearly gave up Rotary. When the Commonwealth closed down he did resign from the Business and Professionals. It had become a hollow farce, hardly enough for Whiteheads Cafe to bother with the catering. When Jean started to complain about the empty shopfronts he felt almost personally accused. He spent hours in his backyard vegetable patch. Getting his fingers into the soil soothed him, it had become his obsession. Though he rationed himself. After work, 5.30 to 6.30. Then he showered and was ready for the seven o’clock news which was always depressing.

  Bernard was not, normally, a gloomy man. His long success in the bank had been, he was certain, because he had a deep cheery voice and he laughed a lot. He heard all the jokes circulating and delighted in passing them on as if he had just invented them himself. He had been often asked to give a speech at christenings and weddings and engagement parties because everyone knew he could keep them giggling and they would begin to relax. Secretly, he remembered some of those events and the long rows of weathered faces stuck with their own glooms, and sometimes it had been a bit of an effort, but when he did get them giggling and loosening up it was its own reward. He had felt his power and, being Bernard, he had rationed it wisely, not allowing himself to be carried away with his success.

  He was known as a modest man, an ordinary bloke; but one who could tell a joke, even a clean one, and the women adored him.

  It was not surprising, then, that he found himself out in the vegetable patch, the memory of the official notification still gripping his throat. He would tell his wife later. Jean didn’t need to know just yet. She was talking about the trip to Port Douglas and somehow he didn’t have the heart. Later, later.

  As always, he slipped out of his suit and tugged on the old tweed trousers that hung on the back of the toolhouse door, with their braces and the leather belt (just to make sure). He b
uttoned up the flies. These old pants still had flies. He found the old shirt, one of half dozen or so he kept down there for the gardening, with its frayed collar and the missing button. He felt comfortable in these old duds and ready for the digging.

  There were the potatoes that must be ready now. The soil down that end was clayey and had taken a lot of breaking up with fresh compost and some fertiliser; the spuds should be whoppers, he estimated. Two weeks ago he had made a tentative dig and resisted the temptation. Patience was always one of his virtues. Now it would be rewarded. He measured out the broadest spade, the one that his father had given him, back in the early days. The old man had been a tyrant, but it was amazing the number of things Bernard still retained from then, and the number of actions and habits that endured. Even the gardening. As a kid he had rebelled – or he imagined he had rebelled, though it was simply a matter of demanding some time for himself on a Saturday morning. When he did force his father to give him time off (one weekend in four) he found himself bored and with nothing to do. Even his stamp collection seemed hollow and worthless. It was an evening thing, it did not feel right to be a Saturday Morning pastime. He had returned, of his own accord, to assisting his father, who then gave him his own bed to look after. He still remembered the pure joy when he dug up his first Bernard ­potatoes, as the old man called them. They made a ceremony that very night, a special Bernard potato dish, with butter and a topping of cheese. It had set him on his way.

  Still smiling to himself, remembering all that, Bernard ambled down to the back bed. Was he humming just then? He turned the first sod. Yes, the soil was still pretty raw clay, but not as bad as when he first turned it over and of course he should have put in more compost but it was a start. It was a shale mixed in with the clay down this end. That made it harder and was probably why he never bothered to prepare this corner of the allotment for veggies until now. It had remained grass.