Picnic at Hanging Rock Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  List of Characters

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  Joan Lindsay was born in Melbourne, where she went to school as a day-girl for a few years at Clyde Girls Grammar, then situated in East St Kilda. She knew and loved the Macedon district from early childhood.

  In 1922 in London she married Sir Daryl Lindsay. The Lindsays travelled together in Europe and the USA, Daryl with his paints and Joan with her typewriter. Sir Daryl died in 1976. Joan lived at their country home on the Mornington Peninsula, Mulberry Hill, Victoria, Australia. She died in December 1984.

  List of Characters

  MRS APPLEYARD, Headmistress of Appleyard College

  MISS GRETA MCCRAW, Mathematics mistress

  MLLE DIANNE DE POITIERS, French and Dancing mistress

  MISS DORA LUMLEY, MISS BUCK, junior mistresses

  MIRANDA, IRMA LEOPOLD, MARION QUADE, senior boarders

  EDITH HORTON, the College dunce

  SARA WAYBOURNE, the youngest boarder

  ROSAMUND, BLANCHE, and other boarders

  COOK, MINNIE AND ALICE, domestic staff at the College

  EDWARD WHITEHEAD, the College gardener

  IRISH TOM, handyman at the College

  MR BEN HUSSEY, of Hussey’s Livery Stables, Woodend

  DOCTOR MCKENZIE, a family doctor from Woodend

  CONSTABLE BUMPHER, of the Woodend Police Station

  MRS BUMPHER

  JIM, a young policeman

  M. LOUIS MONTPELIER, a Bendigo watchmaker

  REG LUMLEY, brother of DORA LUMLEY

  JASPER COSGROVE, guardian of SARA WAYBOURNE

  COLONEL AND MRS FITZHUBERT, summer residents at Lake View, Upper Macedon

  THE HON. MICHAEL FITZHUBERT, their nephew from England

  ALBERT CRUNDALL, coachman at Lake View

  MR CUTLER, gardener at Lake View

  MRS CUTLER

  MAJOR SPRACK AND HIS DAUGHTER, ANGELA, English visitors at Government Cottage, Macedon

  DOCTOR COOLING, from Lower Macedon

  And many others who do not appear in this book.

  Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

  PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

  Joan Lindsay

  1

  Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the dining-room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive. Heavy-headed dahlias flamed and drooped in the immaculate flowerbeds, the well-trimmed lawns steamed under the mounting sun. Already the gardener was watering the hydrangeas still shaded by the kitchen wing at the rear of the College. The boarders at Mrs Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies had been up and scanning the bright unclouded sky since six o’clock and were now fluttering about in their holiday muslins like a flock of excited butterflies. Not only was it a Saturday and the long awaited occasion of the annual picnic, but Saint Valentine’s Day, traditionally celebrated on the fourteenth of February by the interchange of elaborate cards and favours. All were madly romantic and strictly anonymous – supposedly the silent tributes of lovesick admirers; although Mr Whitehead the elderly English gardener and Tom the Irish groom were almost the only two males to be so much as smiled at during the term.

  The Headmistress was probably the only person at the College who received no cards. It was well known that Mrs Appleyard disapproved of Saint Valentine and his ridiculous greetings that cluttered up the College mantelpieces right up to Easter and gave as much extra dusting to the maids as the annual prize-giving. And such mantelpieces! Two in the long drawing-room of white marble, supported by pairs of caryatids as firm of bust as Madam herself; others of carved and tortured wood embellished with a thousand winking tiddling mirrors. Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place. The clumsy two storey mansion was one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold. Why this particular stretch of flat sparsely wooded country, a few miles out of the village of Macedon crouching at the foot of the mount, had been selected as a suitable building site, nobody will ever know. The insignificant creek that meandered in a series of shallow pools down the slope at the rear of the ten acre property offered little inducement as a setting for an Italianate mansion; nor the occasional glimpses, through a screen of stringy-barked eucalyptus, of the misty summit of Mount Macedon rising up to the east on the opposite side of the road. However, built it was, and of solid Castlemaine stone, to withstand the ravages of time. The original owner, whose name is long ago forgotten, had only lived in it for a year or two before the huge ugly house was standing empty and up for sale.

  The spacious grounds, comprising vegetable and flower gardens, pig and poultry pens, orchard and tennis lawns, were in wonderful order, thanks to Mr Whitehead the English gardener, still in charge. There were several vehicles in the handsome stone stables, all in excellent repair. The hideous Victorian furnishings were as good as new, with marble mantelpieces direct from Italy and thick piled carpets from Axminster. The oil lamps on the cedar staircase were held aloft by classical statues, there was a grand piano in the long drawing-room and even a square tower, reached by a narrow circular staircase, from which the Union Jack could be hoisted on Queen Victoria’s birthday. To Mrs Appleyard, newly arrived from England with a considerable nest-egg and letters of introduction to some of the leading Australian families, the mansion, standing well back from the Bendigo Road behind a low stone wall, was immediately impressive. The brown pebble eyes ever on the alert for a bargain summed up the amazing place as ideal for a select and suitably expensive boarding school – better still a College – for Young Ladies. To the delight of the Bendigo house agent who was showing her over the property she had bought it then and there, lock, stock and barrel, including the gardener, with a reduction for cash down, and moved in.

  Whether the Headmistress of Appleyard College (as the local white elephant was at once re-christened in gold lettering on a handsome board at the big iron gates) had any previous experience in the educational field, was never divulged. It was unnecessary. With her high-piled greying pompadour and ample bosom, as rigidly controlled and disciplined as her private ambitions, the cameo portrait of her late husband flat on her respectable chest, the stately stranger looked precisely what the parents expected of an English Headmistress. And as looking the part is well known to be more than half the battle in any form of business enterprise from Punch and Judy to floating a loan on the Stock Exchange, the College, from the very first day, was a success; and by the end of the first year, showing a gratifying profit. All this was nearly six years before this chronicle begins.

  Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours, and not only the young and beautiful were kept busy opening their cards this morning. Miranda as usual had a drawer of her w
ardrobe filled with lace-trimmed pledges of affection, although Baby Jonnie’s home-grown cupid and row of pencilled kisses, addressed from Queensland in her father’s large loving hand, held pride of place on the marble mantelpiece. Edith Horton, plain as a frog, had smugly accounted for at least eleven, and even little Miss Lumley had produced at the breakfast table a card with a bilious looking dove bearing the inscription I ADORE THEE EVER. A statement presumably coming from the drab unspeakable brother who had called on his sister last term. Who else, reasoned the budding girls, would adore the myopic junior governess, eternally garbed in brown serge and flat-heeled shoes?

  ‘He is fond of her,’ said Miranda, ever charitable. ‘I saw them kissing goodbye at the hall door.’

  ‘But darling Miranda – Reg Lumley is such a dreary creature!’ laughed Irma, characteristically shaking out blue-black curls and idly wondering why the school straw hat was so unbecoming. Radiantly lovely at seventeen, the little heiress was without personal vanity or pride of possession. She loved people and things to be beautiful, and pinned a bunch of wildflowers into her coat with as much pleasure as a breathtaking diamond brooch. Sometimes just to look at Miranda’s calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure. Darling Miranda now gazing dreamily out at the sunlit garden. ‘What a wonderful day! I can hardly wait to get out into the country!’

  ‘Listen to her, girls! Anyone would think that Appleyard College was in the Melbourne slums!’

  ‘Forests,’ said Miranda, ‘with ferns and birds . . . like we have at home.’ ‘And spiders,’ Marion said. ‘I only wish someone had sent me a map of the Hanging Rock for a Valentine, I could have taken it to the picnic.’ Irma was forever being struck by the extraordinary notions of Marion Quade and now wanted to know whoever wanted to look at maps at a picnic?

  ‘I do,’ Marion truthfully said. ‘I always like to know exactly where I am.’ Reputed to have mastered Long Division in the cradle, Marion Quade had spent the greater part of her seventeen years in the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Small wonder that with her thin intelligent features, sensitive nose that appeared to be always on the scent of something long awaited and sought, and thin swift legs, she had come to resemble a greyhound.

  The girls began discussing their Valentines. ‘Somebody had the nerve to send Miss McCraw a card on squared paper, covered with little sums,’ said Rosamund. Actually this card had been the inspired gesture of Irish Tom, egged on by Minnie the housemaid, for a lark. The forty-five-year-old purveyor of higher mathematics to the senior girls had received it with dry approval, figures in the eyes of Greta McCraw being a good deal more acceptable than roses and forget-me-nots. The very sight of a sheet of paper dotted over with numerals gave her a secret joy; a sense of power, knowing how with a stroke or two of a pencil they could be sorted out, divided, multiplied, re-arranged to miraculous new conclusions. Tom’s Valentine, though he never knew it, was a success. His choice for Minnie was a bleeding heart embedded in roses and obviously in the last stages of a fatal disease. Minnie was enchanted, as was Mademoiselle with an old French print of a solitary rose. Thus Saint Valentine reminded the inmates of Appleyard College of the colour and variety of love.

  Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who taught dancing and French conversation and attended to the boarders’ wardrobes, was bustling about in a fever of delighted anticipation. Like her charges she wore a simple muslin dress in which she contrived to look elegant by the addition of a wide ribbon belt and shady straw hat. Only a few years older than some of the senior boarders, she was equally enchanted at the prospect of escaping from the suffocating routine of the College for a whole long summer day, and ran here and there amongst the girls assembling for a final roll call on the front verandah.

  ‘Depêchez-vous, mes enfants, depêchez-vous. Tais-toi, Irma,’ chirped the light canary voice of Mademoiselle, for whom la petite Irma could do no wrong. The girl’s voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes in the dingy schoolroom the Frenchwoman, brought up amongst the great European galleries, would look up from her desk and see her against a background of cherries and pineapples, cherubs and golden flagons, surrounded by elegant young men in velvets and satins. . . . ‘Tais-toi, Irma . . . Miss McCraw vient d’arriver.’ A gaunt female figure in a puce-coloured pelisse was emerging from the outdoor ‘dunnie’, an earth-closet reached by a secluded path edged with begonias. The governess walked at her usual measured pace, uninhibited as Royalty, and with an almost royal dignity. Nobody had ever seen her in a hurry, or without her steel rimmed spectacles.

  Greta McCraw had undertaken to take on picnic duty today, assisted by Mademoiselle, purely as a matter of conscience. A brilliant mathematician – far too brilliant for her poorly paid job at the College – she would have given a five pound note to have spent this precious holiday, no matter how fine, shut up in her room with that fascinating new treatise on the Calculus. A tall woman with dry ochre skin and coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird’s nest on top of her head, she had remained oblivious to the vagaries of the Australian scene despite a residence of thirty years. Climate meant nothing, nor fashion, nor the never ending miles of gum trees and dry yellow grass, of which she was hardly more aware than of the mists and mountains of her native Scotland, as a girl. The boarders, used to her outlandish wardrobe, were no longer amused, and her choice for today’s picnic went without comment – the well known church-going toque and black laced boots, together with the puce-coloured pelisse, in which her bony frame took on the proportions of one of her own Euclidian triangles, and a pair of rather shabby puce kid gloves.

  Mademoiselle, on the other hand, as an admired arbiter of fashion, was minutely examined and passed with honours, down to the turquoise ring and white silk gloves. ‘Although,’ said Blanche, ‘I’m surprised at her letting Edith go out in those larky blue ribbons. Whatever is Edith looking at over there?’ A pasty-faced fourteen-year-old with the contours of an overstuffed bolster was standing a few feet away, staring up at the window of a room on the first floor. Miranda tossed back her straight corn-coloured hair, smiling and waving at a pale little pointed face looking dejectedly down at the animated scene below. ‘It’s not fair,’ said Irma, waving and smiling too, ‘after all the child is only thirteen. I never thought Mrs A. would be so mean.’

  Miranda sighed: ‘Poor little Sara – she wanted so much to go to the picnic.’

  Failure to recite ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ yesterday had condemned the child Sara Waybourne to solitary confinement upstairs. Later, she would pass the sweet summer afternoon in the empty schoolroom, committing the hated masterpiece to memory. The College was already, despite its brief existence, quite famed for its discipline, deportment and mastery of English literature.

  Now an immense purposeful figure was swimming and billowing in grey silk taffeta on to the tiled and colonnaded verandah, like a galleon in full sail. On the gently heaving bosom, a cameo portrait of a gentleman in side whiskers, framed in garnets and gold, rose and fell in tune with the pumping of the powerful lungs encased in a fortress of steel busks and stiff grey calico. ‘Good morning, girls,’ boomed the gracious plummy voice, specially imported from Kensington.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Appleyard,’ chorused the curtseying half-circle drawn up before the hall door.

  ‘Are we all present, Mademoiselle? Good. Well, young ladies, we are indeed fortunate in the weather for our picnic to Hanging Rock. I have instructed Mademoiselle that as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves after the drag has passed through Woodend. You will partake of luncheon at the Picnic Grounds near the Rock. Once again let me remind you that the Rock itself is extremely dangerous and you are therefore forbidden to engage in any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes. It is, however, a geological marvel on which you will be required to write a brief essay on Monday morning. I also w
ish to remind you that the vicinity is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants of various species. I think that is all. Have a pleasant day and try to behave yourselves in a manner to bring credit to the College. I shall expect you back, Miss McCraw and Mademoiselle, at about eight o’clock for a light supper.’

  The covered drag from Hussey’s Livery stables at Lower Macedon, drawn by five splendid bay horses, was already drawn up at the College gates with Mr Hussey on the box. Mr Hussey had personally driven ‘The College’ on all important occasions ever since the grand opening day when the parents had come up by train from Melbourne to drink champagne on the lawns. With his kindly shrewd blue eyes and cheeks perpetually blooming like the Mount Macedon rose gardens, he was a prime favourite with everyone in the district; even Mrs Appleyard called him her ‘good man’ and enjoyed graciously inviting him into her study for a glass of sherry . . .

  ‘Steady there Sailor . . . Woa Duchess . . . Belmonte, I’ll give you such a lathering . . .’ The five well-trained horses were actually standing like statues, but it was all part of the fun; Mr Hussey like all good coachmen having a nice sense of style and timing. ‘Mind your gloves on the wheel Miss McCraw, it’s dusty . . .’ He had long ago given up attempting to teach this basic truth to lady passengers about to enter one of his cabs. At last everyone was seated to the satisfaction of special friends and enemies and the two governesses. The three senior girls, Miranda, Irma and Marion Quade, inseparable companions, were allotted the coveted box seat in front beside the driver, an arrangement with which Mr Hussey was well pleased. Nice high-spirited girls, all three of ’em . . .