Watching the Climbers on the Mountain Read online

  •

  Ward Rankin was in an uncomfortable state of mind. On entering the house he went straight to the sitting room. This was a room of generous proportions in the eastern end of the house. Rooms had been built on around it and it was now windowless, in a perpetual half-light even on the brightest day. Filled with Rankin’s books and the heavy Victorian furniture of his parents, the room had a musty, suspended-in-time feeling about it. The children avoided it and, except for the first half-hour or so by the wood fire after dinner on chilly winter evenings, it was never the scene of family gatherings.

  Rankin switched on a wall lamp and closed the door. Sitting at his desk he began sorting through the mail which had arrived the day before. Much of the correspondence was from stock agents and distributors seeking payment of their bills and custom for new products. The details of this work disgusted him today and he couldn’t settle to it. After a few minutes he gave up and sat staring at the bookshelves.

  In part the reason for his extreme restlessness was clear. He was justifiably upset with the stockman for putting his best mare out of action. It was the sort of gross clumsiness he hated more than anything. There was something ugly about such a thing. It was a serious act of stupidity. But here Rankin’s feelings encountered a difficulty, for he was aware that Robert Crofts was not stupid. Staring at the spines of the books Rankin realised that he was beginning to formulate an unpleasant intimation. Could there have been something wilful in the shooting of the mare by the stockman? He had no wish to consider such a possibility and made an effort to distract himself at once. He ripped open the first envelope lying before him and saw that it contained a letter from Dennis Laing, the Rockhampton manager of The Australian Estates Company. One of the first things Laing asked was, ‘How is Crofts settling in?’ It was a reasonable enough enquiry, as it had been Rankin’s request to Laing that had resulted in Crofts being sent out to the station from the coast.

  Throughout his life Ward Rankin had perceived station hands as men belonging to a race of beings distinct from and inferior to his own. He would never have expressed it like that, but it was how he saw the matter. As a boy home from boarding school only during the holidays he had had fleeting contact with a succession of these men who, for the most part, were semi-itinerant in their habits and more or less illiterate—their legacy of reading matter was invariably a messy collection of wretched magazines shoved in a corner of the quarters or strewn around the floor after they had departed. They came from poor town families. Rankin had viewed his own future then as a flowing one, securely in place among the prolific and civilised offerings of a mellow European scholarship—a view no less real to him for having been largely imagined for him through the eyes of his schoolmasters. He did not see himself as the daily companion of station hands.

  Rankin had specifically requested Laing in his recruiting to look out for someone a bit different from the usual run and had not objected when the latter had telephoned to say that a young English boy was looking for work on a cattle station. He had even permitted himself to look forward with a degree of pleasurable anticipation to Robert Crofts’ arrival and, reassured by his appearance at their first meeting, had initially offered him the use of his books. But the response to his unheard-of invitation had been disappointing. More than that, his rejected offer of intimacy had left Rankin with the uncomfortable feeling that he might have rendered himself vulnerable to the stockman. He had been looking for the means to redress the balance ever since. The accident with his mare this morning had seemed to present the perfect opportunity for putting Crofts firmly back in his place. But in the yards Rankin had found himself inarticulate. As he sat at his desk ripping open envelopes Ward Rankin conjured for himself a fantasy in which he humiliated Crofts. In this daydream the stockman was no longer muscularly beautiful but bore instead the worried hungry look of the local poor. Rankin felt a little better after this and even managed to settle down to his work for a time.

  There were many causes for Ward Rankin’s disturbed state of mind this morning. He had found satisfaction in neither of two fundamental areas of life—sex and the fulfilment of dreams. And these failures were connected. The most promising relationship of his youth—a deep love for his English master at school which had matured during the best four years of his life—had remained unconsummated, leaving both the man and the scholar in him forever stranded on the edge of seduction. For years after his enforced return to the station he had kept up a correspondence with his friend, who had guided him in his thinking and in his careful assembling of a library. It became a matter, however, of rationalising hopes that in the end were no longer real. The library had ceased to grow and the correspondence had dropped from a letter a month to a letter a year and at last to silence. Even reading in the newspaper of the man’s death years later had not greatly moved him.

  Ward Rankin’s scholarship, such as it was, had become frozen in time, his attitudes those of a generation whose opinions were no longer viable. Recently he had wondered briefly if those early preoccupations might not be rekindled. As he sat alone at his desk this morning he found himself again—and against his will—thinking of Robert Crofts. The stockman had stood in the doorway and gazed around the unfamiliar room, his expression betraying neither interest nor surprise. He had accepted the loan of a volume but it was clear that the books meant nothing to him. That day Ward Rankin had decided that Crofts was bent on some private purpose of his own.

  On the verandah a screen door banged twice in quick succession announcing that the children’s morning lessons with their mother had come to an end. Rankin got up and left his paperwork unfinished. In the bright light on the verandah his wife was laying the table for morning tea.

  Ida Rankin was as much a Central Highlander as her husband. Her great-grandparents had trekked their belongings, their cattle and their horses almost two thousand kilometres from the Goulburn district of New South Wales to settle on the Nogoa River in 1862, less than a year after the local Aborigines had been exterminated by the settlers in retribution for the massacre of the Wills family at Cullin-la-Ringo. In contrast to these preceding horrors, her family had enjoyed the beginning of a peaceful and prosperous history. Like Rankin she had spent four years at a boarding school on the coast and had then returned to the station, intending to stay no more than twelve months before starting an Arts degree at the university in Brisbane. While her sojourn away from the Highlands had broadened her view of the world and of her possibilities it had done nothing to erode her love for the grand landscape of her childhood.

  Unlike Ward Rankin she had not wished to escape from the Highlands but, as a child of a large family, had viewed her eventual departure from them as a sad necessity. She was not indifferent to the effects of beauty on her soul—Goorbulla, the mysterious ‘roof’ of Queensland and once the sacred domain of the Bidjara peoples had revealed itself to her in childhood and she was never thereafter entirely free of its irrational influence. By volunteering her services as companion to Ward Rankin’s semi-invalid mother she had found a convenient way to occupy her time. She had also been attracted by the element of risk in sharing, for a limited period, a domestic situation with a man of Rankin’s age and difficult disposition. Once within the household her youthful enthusiasm had seized on Rankin’s unresponsive personality as a challenge to her womanhood. Her teachers had made her as familiar with English literature as he was and so she had contrived this as the way to bring them together. Love had never really come into it for either of them. For the past few years they had shared the same bed only on rare occasions, and then uneasily.

  •

  The western verandah was glassed in, resembling a large gallery, and remained relatively cool in summer until the early afternoon. Inside the verandah the dark oiled cedar slats of the venetian blinds lay three-quarters closed against the glass. As the house was raised on timber piles four metres from the level ground, the intense white brilliance of the day streamed upwards through the blinds and saturated
the room with a glow of light, as if the particles of air were themselves the source of this illumination. Ida Rankin came and went quickly from the adjoining kitchen. She was barefoot and in this light her arms and legs had the sheen of vigorous good health. Her movements were imbued with a sense of purpose. She was in a hurry.

  When he came out onto the verandah Ward Rankin did not sit at the table nor did he make any move to assist his wife. Instead he went to the far end of the room and stood peering down through the inclined slats of the blinds, scrutinising the approaches to the back steps. The blazing light lay vertical ripples of shadow on the sharp planes of his face as he stood squinting at the ground below.

  Ida Rankin returned with a large oval dish of hot pikelets. Placing it on the table, she said flatly, ‘He went for a swim with the children.’ She did not look at her husband but went back to the kitchen the moment she had put down the dish. At her words he turned from the window and watched her leave, then stood frowning as he heard her talking familiarly with the resident colony of kitchen garden birds, whose incessant chattering was the only noise outside. When she came back with the pot of tea they both sat down at the table. She had brought her own pile of mail and busied herself examining it. For a while neither spoke. He watched her, however, as if he were expecting her to say something, and as the minutes went by he grew more fidgety. Finally, when the voices of the children returning from the creek could be heard, he asked abruptly, ‘Was he wearing togs this time?’

  She laughed, both impatient and incredulous, as though she had just heard of some ridiculous ineptitude that had been perpetrated by someone she already despised. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said almost gaily. ‘He had a towel around his waist.’

  It was clear that Ward Rankin was intensely irritated by his wife’s manner. She continued to eat pikelets and to rip open mail as if nothing were amiss. ‘Didn’t you call out to him?’ Rankin demanded, his annoyance hardening into anger. ‘And ask him?’

  She was careful to keep a neutral tone, aware of how much this was provoking her husband. She did not look at him. ‘After what was said, I’m sure he would have been wearing something.’ Her mail consisted principally of a mass of correspondence from members of the Country Women’s Association and the local chapter of the Red Cross. During a visit to town some months ago she had been charmed into a burst of public spiritedness and had agreed to coordinate the efforts of these two groups in a fund-raising carnival to be held the day after Christmas. Among the daunting pile of business before her now there was, however, a welcome postcard from her younger brother. It was a picture of the main street of Gympie, a coastal town in the southern part of the state, where he had gone at the beginning of the year to take up his first job as a clerk in the butter factory. Surprisingly he was enjoying himself. ‘Gil sends his love,’ she said. And now she did look at her husband, proffering the postcard. ‘He’s looking forward to coming up for Christmas.’ And when Rankin ignored it she placed the card on the cloth in front of him. ‘Would you like to see what he’s got to say?’

  Their eyes met.

  ‘We agreed that you would keep a check!’ he said sharply.

  ‘I’d have felt ridiculous,’ she answered, ‘shouting a question like that at him from the kitchen window.’

  He turned the card over, glanced at the writing then at the picture of the street, and let it fall from his fingers.

  ‘I’m not concerned about how you feel,’ he said with the same measured pedantic tone in which he had spoken to the stockman earlier that morning—he might have been charging his wife with stupidity. ‘It is Janet I’m worried about.’

  ‘Who else?’ she said as the children came bounding up the steps. Janet Rankin was first through the door. She was followed by her younger brother, who struggled after her as if he were trying to keep pace with an altogether freer being than himself.

  Janet Rankin went straight up to the table and snatched a pikelet from the dish. She ate it at once, stuffing it greedily into her mouth without bothering to butter it. She was startlingly like her father. Small and fine-boned, with a thin face, she had the same wary eyes as he did, grey and restless, whose aloof expression conveyed her sense of her own personal superiority over the individuals and conditions around her. It was an expression, however, which served to mask her innermost feelings. She smiled at her father and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Like her brother she was naked except for a pair of underpants. Her dark hair was dripping wet and lay in long thin strands like water weed across her bony shoulders. There were goosebumps on her shivering skin and around her nipples the swollen rose-pink aureoles of puberty shone and accentuated her nakedness.

  ‘Get something dry on before you catch a chill,’ Ward Rankin said.

  ‘He’s not coming,’ she pronounced. Her gaze remained steady on the dish of pikelets. ‘He’s gone.’

  For an instant Ward Rankin thought his daughter meant the stockman had left the station, had really gone, walked off the place as men sometimes did after accidents or disagreements, offended and suspicious, saying nothing. He even saw an image of Crofts’ solitary figure tramping down the road in the direction of town. ‘Gone where?’ he exclaimed. His wife looked at him, an echo of his anguish in the sharpness of his query.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked uncertainly, turning to her daughter. ‘Where has he gone?’

  Only the girl’s pale lips betrayed the satisfaction she derived from her parents’ reaction. ‘Can I have another pikelet?’ she asked quietly, gazing fixedly at her father.

  ‘No you can’t!’ Her mother’s voice was severe.

  ‘He went to the Pinnacles,’ the girl continued, unmoved by her mother’s irritation and now wringing water from her hair onto the floor. ‘Exploring. You know.’

  ‘Get dressed this minute!’ Ida Rankin said angrily. ‘That goes for the pair of you!’

  After the children had gone Ward Rankin got up, avoiding his wife’s gaze, and left the verandah. In the half-light of the sitting room once more, with the door closed, he took out a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard next to his desk, and as he poured a good quantity of the liquor into the glass he grimly delivered himself of a string of obscenities.

  •

  At the deepest level of her being Ida Rankin knew that she was not complete. She had never fully articulated it, even to herself. It was a conviction she was accustomed to living with. The nearest she got to sharing it with another person was a peripheral sense that her mother had probably felt something like it too. She didn’t know what the remedy for this condition might be and she didn’t examine possibilities in any intellectual way. When the burden of this conviction forced itself into the forefront of her feelings she thought of the landscape. There was nothing else to balance her need, no event grand enough to match it.

  Within a few minutes of his leaving the verandah she had dismissed her husband from her mind. She stepped under the shower and turned her face upward to the chill rush of water. Making sharp breathy noises she rubbed herself vigorously all over with both hands before stepping out. The water came directly from a five-hundred gallon tank above the bathroom. For lack of enterprise rather than money the bathroom was an extremely primitive affair—no more than the tall enclosed tankstand. It stood several yards from the north-east corner of the house. The walls were unpainted corrugated iron and the floor was concrete. As she soaped herself Ida Rankin moved in and out of thin spears of sunlight that dissected the cool interior, and in the corners of the ceiling frogs held themselves above her in clusters, their bulbous backs gleaming with a deep aniline-green like lustrous ceramic vessels.

  Her thoughts ran on from looking forward to her brother’s stay, to the annual holiday at Yepoon, by which time all the fuss with the carnival would be over. Impending activities thronged her mind, reassuring her that everything was normal. Patterns of familiar events unfolded, were enacted and re-enacted—her sixty-kilometre drive alone into town this afternoon and the meeting with the o
ther committee members was also a pleasant part of this anticipated action. And then she thought of her daughter’s departure from home in February to begin form two at boarding school. Two years ago she would have been dreading this; now she was looking forward to it. She had lost both of them. The boy still sometimes searched her eyes for their earlier intimacy. But she knew that was gone for ever. The girl had him. She’d taken him with her into some other reality. And what was incredible to Ida Rankin was that she felt no loss. That she felt, indeed, as though she were gathering her scattered self into a whole again.

  She finished working up a lather and stepped under the downpour of heavily mineralised bore water. It felt warmer now. As a young girl, after a terrifying climb during which she had more than once been unable to retreat or go on, she had finally stood alone on the towering white sandstone pinnacle of Mt Mooloolong. In a trance of fear and exhaustion she had gazed down at the forest hundreds of metres below and she had believed then that she would jump from the pinnacle. There were odd disjointed moments in her life when she was convinced she had jumped that day and that somehow the jump was still going on. She had no other memory of coming down the rock face.

  The original impulse to undertake the adventure had arisen from a need to equal by some magnificent feat the superior status enjoyed by her five older brothers, one or other of whom seemed always to be winning a difficult competition or achieving a significant goal, while she just went on being herself year after year. The importance of this motive had been overshadowed for her by the experience of the climb itself.

  She was twelve when she climbed Mt Mooloolong alone. The extraordinary feat altered her view of herself; it revealed a potential within her which the ordinary demands of her life did not require her to call on. Her knowledge of this potential, and her failure ever to invoke it again, underlay her uneasy sense that she was incomplete. It was also why, at certain critical periods of her life, she had turned more readily to the landscape for reassurance than to people.