Picnic at Hanging Rock Read online

  ‘Only a few hundred yards,’ said Marion Quade. ‘We shall have to walk along by the creek which will take a little longer.’

  ‘May I come too?’ asked Edith, rising to her feet with a prodigious show of yawning. ‘I ate so much pie at lunch I can hardly keep awake.’ The other two looked enquiringly at Miranda and Edith was allowed to tag along behind.

  ‘Don’t worry about us, Mam’selle dear,’ smiled Miranda. ‘We shall only be gone a very little while.’

  The governess stood and watched the four girls walking off towards the creek; Miranda a little ahead gliding through tall grasses that brushed her pale skirts, Marion and Irma following arm in arm with Edith bumbling along in the rear. When they reached the clump of rushes where the stream changed its course Miranda stopped, turned her shining head and gravely smiled at Mademoiselle who smiled back and waved, and stood there smiling and waving until they were out of sight round the bend. ‘Mon Dieu!’ she exclaimed to the empty blue, ‘now I know . . .’

  ‘What do you know?’ asked Greta McCraw, suddenly peering up over the top of her book, alert and factual, as was her disconcerting way. The Frenchwoman, seldom at loss for a word, even in English, found herself embarrassingly tongue-tied. It simply wasn’t possible to explain to Miss McCraw of all people her exciting discovery that Miranda was a Botticelli angel from the Uffizi . . . impossible to explain or even think clearly on a summer afternoon of things that really mattered. Love for instance, when only a few minutes ago the thought of Louis’ hand expertly turning the key of the little Sèvres clock had made her feel almost ready to faint. She lay down again on the warm scented grass, watching the shadows of overhanging branches moving away from the hamper containing milk and lemonade. Soon it would be exposed to the full glare of the sun and she must rouse herself and carry it into the shade. Already the four girls must have been away for ten minutes, perhaps more. It was unnecessary to consult a watch. The exquisite languor of the afternoon told her that this was the hour when people weary of humdrum activities tend to doze and dream as she was doing now. At Appleyard College the pupils in the late afternoon classes had to be continually reminded to sit up straight and get on with their lessons. Opening one eye, she could see the two industrious sisters at the pool had put away their sketchbooks and fallen asleep. Rosamund nodded over her embroidery. By a sheer effort of will Mademoiselle made herself count over the nineteen girls under her care. All except Edith and the three seniors were visible and within easy call. Closing her eyes, she permitted herself the luxury of continuing an interrupted dream.

  Meanwhile the four girls were still following the winding course of the creek upstream. From its hidden source somewhere in the tangle of bracken and dogwood at the base of the Rock it approached the level plain of the Picnic Grounds as an almost invisible trickle, then suddenly for a hundred yards or so became deeper and clearer, running quite swiftly over the smooth stones and presently opening out into a little pool ringed by grass of a brilliant watery green. Which no doubt had made this particular spot the choice of the party with the wagonette for their picnic. A stout bewhiskered elderly man with a solar topee tipped over a large scarlet face was lying fast asleep on his back with his hands crossed over a stomach swathed in a scarlet cummerbund. Nearby, a little woman in an elaborate silk dress sat with closed eyes propped against a tree and a pile of cushions from the wagonette, fanning herself with a palmleaf fan. A slender fair youth – or very young man – in English riding breeches was absorbed in a magazine, while another of about the same age, or a little older, as tough and sunburned as the other was tender and pink of cheek, was engaged in rinsing the champagne glasses at the edge of the pool. His coachman’s cap and dark blue jacket with silver buttons were thrown carelessly over a clump of reeds, exposing a mop of thick dark hair and a pair of strong copper-coloured arms, heavily tattooed with mermaids.

  Although the four girls following the endless loops and turns of the wayward creek were now almost abreast of the picnic party, the Hanging Rock remained tantalizingly hidden behind the screen of tall forest trees. ‘We really must find a suitable place to cross over,’ said Miranda, screwing up her eyes, ‘or we shall see nothing at all before we have to turn back.’ The creek was getting wider as it approached the pool. Marion Quade produced her ruler: ‘At least four feet and no stepping stones.’

  ‘I vote we take a flying leap and hope for the best.’ said Irma, gathering up her skirts. ‘Can you manage it, Edith?’ Miranda asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to wet my feet.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Marion Quade.

  ‘I might get pneumonia and die and then you’d stop teasing me and be sorry.’

  The bright fast-flowing water was crossed without mishap, to the obvious approval of the young coachman who had greeted their approach with a low penetrating whistle. As soon as the girls were out of earshot and walking away towards the southern slopes of the Rock, the youth in riding breeches threw down the Illustrated London News and strolled down towards the pool. ‘Can I lend a hand with those glasses?’

  ‘No, you can’t. I’m only giving ’em a bit of a lick over so Cook won’t rouse on me when I get home.’

  ‘Oh . . . I see . . . I’m afraid I don’t know much about washing up. . . . Look here, Albert . . . I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but I wish you hadn’t done that just now.’

  ‘Done what, Mr Michael?’

  ‘Whistled at those girls when they were going to jump over the creek.’

  ‘It’s a free country as far as I know. What’s the harm in a whistle?’

  ‘Only that you’re such a good chap,’ said the other, ‘and nice girls don’t like being whistled at by fellows they don’t know.’

  Albert grinned. ‘Don’t you believe it! The sheilas is all alike when it comes to the fellers. Do you reckon they come from Appleyard College?’

  ‘Dash it all, Albert, I’ve only been in Australia a few weeks – how should I know who they are? As a matter of fact I only saw them for a moment when I heard you whistle and looked up.’

  ‘Well you can take my word for it,’ Albert said, ‘and I’ve knocked about a fair bit – it’s all the same if it’s a bloody college they come from or the Ballarat Orphanage where me and my kid sister was dragged up.’

  Michael said slowly, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were an orphan.’

  ‘As good as. After me mum cleared out with a bloke from Sydney and me dad walked out on the two of us. That’s when we was clapped into the bloody orphanage.’

  ‘An orphanage?’ repeated the other, who felt himself listening to a first hand account of life on Devil’s Island. ‘Tell me – if you don’t mind talking about it – what’s it like to be brought up in one of those places?’

  ‘Lousy.’ Albert had finished the glasses and was neatly putting away the Colonel’s silver mugs in their leather case.

  ‘Lord, how revolting!’

  ‘Oh, it was clean enough in its way. No lice or anything except when some poor little bugger of a kid gets sent there with nits in its head and Matron gets out a bloody great scissors and cuts off its hair.’ Michael appeared fascinated by the subject of the orphanage. ‘Go on, tell me some more about it. . . . Did they let you see much of your sister?’

  ‘Well, you see, there was bars on all the windows in my day – boys in one classroom, girls in another. Jeez, I haven’t thought about that bloody dump for donkey’s years.’

  ‘Don’t talk so loud. If my Aunt hears you swearing she’ll try and make Uncle give you the sack.’

  ‘Not him!’ said the other, grinning. ‘The Colonel knows I look after his horses damn well and don’t drink his whisky. Well, hardly ever. Tell you the truth I can’t stand the stink of the stuff. This ’ere French fizz of your Uncle’s will do me. Nice and light on the stomach.’ Albert’s worldly wisdom was unending. Michael was filled with admiration.

  ‘I say, Albert – I wish you’d cut out that Mr Michael stuff. It doesn’t sound like
Australia and anyway my name’s Mike to you. Unless my Aunt’s listening.’

  ‘Have it your own way! Mike? Is that short for the Honourable Michael Fitzhubert what’s on your letters? Jeez. What a mouthful! I wouldn’t recognize mine if I was to see it written down in print.’

  To the English youth whose own ancient name was a valued personal possession that travelled everywhere with him, like his pigskin valise and well-filled notecase, this somewhat startling observation needed several minutes of silence to digest, while the coachman surprisingly went on, ‘My Dad used to change his name now and then when he got in a tight corner. I forget what they signed us up at the orphanage. Not that I bloody well care. As far as I’m concerned one bloody name’s the same as another.’

  ‘I like talking to you, Albert. Somehow you always get me thinking.’

  ‘Thinking’s all right if you have the time for it,’ replied the other, reaching for his jacket. ‘I’d better be harnessing up Old Glory or your Auntie’s fur will be flying. She wants to get off early.’

  ‘Right-o. I’ll just stretch my legs a bit before we go.’ Albert stood looking after the slim boyish figure gracefully clearing the creek and striding off towards the Rock. ‘Stretch his legs is it? I don’t mind betting he wants another look at them sheilas . . . That little beaut with the black curls.’ He went back to his horses and began stacking the cups and plates into the Indian straw basket.

  The four girls were already out of sight when Mike came out of the first belt of trees. He looked up at the vertical face of the Rock and wondered how far they would go before turning back. The Hanging Rock, according to Albert, was a tough proposition even for experienced climbers. If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again. He sat down on a fallen log, heard Albert calling him through the trees, and knew that this was the country where he, Michael Fitzhubert, was going to live. What was her name, the tall pale girl with straight yellow hair, who had gone skimming over the water like one of the white swans on his Uncle’s lake?

  3

  The creek had hardly been crossed before the Hanging Rock had risen up directly ahead of the four girls, clearly visible beyond a short grassy slope. Miranda had been the first to see it. ‘No, no, Edith! Not down at your boots! Away up there – in the sky.’ Mike remembered afterwards how she had stopped and called back over her shoulder to the little fat one trudging behind.

  The immediate impact of its soaring peaks induced a silence so impregnated with its powerful presence that even Edith was struck dumb. The splendid spectacle, as if by special arrangement between Heaven and the Head Mistress of Appleyard College, was brilliantly illuminated for their inspection. On the steep southern façade the play of golden light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.

  Confronted by such monumental configurations of nature the human eye is woefully inadequate. Who can say how many or how few of its unfolding marvels are actually seen, selected and recorded by the four pairs of eyes now fixed in staring wonder at the Hanging Rock? Does Marion Quade note the horizontal ledges crisscrossing the verticals of the main pattern whose geological formation must be memorized for next Monday’s essay? Is Edith aware of the hundreds of frail starlike flowers crushed under her tramping boots, while Irma catches the scarlet flash of a parrot’s wing and thinks it a flame amongst the leaves? And Miranda, whose feet appear to be choosing their own way through the ferns as she tilts her head towards the glittering peaks, does she already feel herself more than a spectator agape at a holiday pantomime? So they walk silently towards the lower slopes, in single file, each locked in the private world of her own perceptions, unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth: of the creakings and shudderings, the wandering airs and currents known only to the wise little bats, hanging upside down in its clammy caves. None of them see or hear the snake dragging its copper coils over the stones ahead. Nor the panic exodus of spiders, grubs and woodlice from rotting leaves and bark. There are no tracks on this part of the Rock. Or if there ever have been tracks, they are long since obliterated. It is a long long time since any living creature other than an occasional rabbit or wallaby trespassed upon its arid breast.

  Marion was the first to break through the web of silence. ‘Those peaks . . . they must be a million years old.’

  ‘A million. Oh, how horrible!’ Edith exclaimed. ‘Miranda! Did you hear that?’ At fourteen, millions of years can be almost indecent. Miranda, illumined by a calm wordless joy, merely smiled back. Edith persisted. ‘Miranda! It’s not true, is it?’

  ‘My Papa made a million out of a mine once – in Brazil,’ Irma said. ‘He bought Mama a ruby ring.’

  ‘Money’s quite different,’ Edith rightly observed.

  ‘Whether Edith likes it or not,’ Marion pointed out, ‘that fat little body of hers is made up of millions and millions of cells.’ Edith put her hands over her ears, ‘Stop it, Marion! I don’t want to hear about such things.’

  ‘And what’s more, you little goose, you have already lived for millions and millions of seconds.’

  Edith had gone quite white in the face. ‘Stop it! You’re making me feel giddy.’

  ‘Ah, don’t tease her, Marion,’ Miranda soothed, seeing the usually unsnubbable Edith for once deflated. ‘The poor child’s overtired.’ ‘Yes,’ said Edith, ‘and those nasty ferns are pricking my legs. Why can’t we all sit down on that log and look at the ugly old Rock from here?’

  ‘Because,’ said Marion Quade, ‘You insisted on coming with us, and we three seniors want a closer view of the Hanging Rock before we go home.’

  Edith had begun to whimper. ‘It’s nasty here . . . I never thought it would be so nasty or I wouldn’t have come . . .’

  ‘I always thought she was a stupid child and now I know,’ Marion reflected out loud. Precisely as she would have stated a proven truth about an isosceles triangle. There was no real rancour in Marion – only a burning desire for truth in all departments.

  ‘Never mind, Edith,’ Irma comforted. ‘You can go home soon and have some more of Saint Valentine’s lovely cake and be happy.’ An uncomplicated solution not only to Edith’s present woe but to the sorrows of all mankind. Even as a little girl, Irma Leopold had wanted above all things to see everyone happy with the cake of their choice. Sometimes it became an almost unbearable longing, as when she had looked down at Mademoiselle asleep on the grass this afternoon. Later it would find expression in fantastic handouts from an overflowing heart and purse, no doubt acceptable to Heaven, if not to her legal advisers: handsome donations to a thousand lost causes – lepers, sinking theatrical companies, missionaries, priests, tubercular prostitutes, saints, lame dogs and deadbeats all over the world.

  ‘I have a feeling there used to be a track somewhere up there,’ said Miranda. ‘I remember my father showing me a picture of people in old-fashioned dresses having a picnic at the Rock. I wish I knew where it was painted.’*

  ‘They may have approached it from the opposite side,’ said Marion, producing her pencil. ‘In those days they probably drove from Mount Macedon. The thing I should like to see are those queer balancing boulders we noticed this morning, from the drag.’

  ‘We can’t go much further,’ said Miranda. ‘Remember, girls, I promised Mademoiselle we wouldn’t be long away.’

  At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mount
ain laurel glossy above the dogwood’s dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace. ‘Well, at least let us see what it looks like over this first little rise,’ said Irma, gathering up her voluminous skirts. ‘Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ The bracken soon gave way to a belt of dense scratchy scrub ending in a waist-high shelf of rock. Miranda was first out of the scrub and kneeling on the rock to pull up the others with the expert assurance that Ben Hussey had admired this morning when she opened the gate. (‘At the age of five,’ her father loved to remember, ‘our Miranda threw a leg over a horse like a boundary rider.’ ‘Yes,’ her mother would add, ‘and entered my drawing-room with her head thrown back, like a little queen.’)

  They found themselves on an almost circular platform enclosed by rocks and boulders and a few straight saplings. Irma at once discovered a sort of porthole in one of the rocks and was gazing down fascinated at the Picnic Grounds below. As if magnified by a powerful telescope, the little bustling scene stood out with stereoscopic clarity between the groups of trees: the drag with Mr Hussey busy amongst his horses, smoke rising from a small fire, the girls moving about in their light dresses and Mademoiselle’s parasol open like a pale blue flower beside the pool.

  It was agreed to rest a few minutes in the shade of some rocks before retracing their steps to the creek. ‘If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise,’ Irma said. ‘Now don’t look so serious, Miranda, darling – we don’t often have a chance to enjoy ourselves out of school.’