Picnic at Hanging Rock Read online

  ‘And without being watched and spied on by that little rat of a Lumley,’ Marion said.

  ‘Blanche says she knows for a fact Miss Lumley only cleans her teeth on Sundays,’ put in Edith.

  ‘Blanche is a disgusting little know-all,’ Marion said, ‘and so are you.’ Edith went on unperturbed, ‘Blanche says Sara writes poetry. In the dunnie, you know. She found one on the floor all about Miranda.’

  ‘Poor little Sara,’ Irma said. ‘I don’t believe she loves anyone in the world except you, Miranda.’

  ‘I can’t think why,’ Marion said.

  ‘She’s an orphan,’ Miranda said gently.

  Irma said, ‘Sara reminds me of a little deer Papa brought home once. The same big frightened eyes. I looked after it for weeks but Mama said it would never survive in captivity.’

  ‘And did it?’ they asked.

  ‘It died. Mama always said it was doomed.’

  Edith echoed, ‘Doomed? What’s that mean, Irma?’

  ‘Doomed to die, of course! Like that boy who “stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled, tra . . . la la . . .” I forget the rest of it.’

  ‘Oh, how nasty! Do you think I’m doomed, girls? I’m not feeling at all well, myself. Do you think that boy felt sick in the stomach like me?’

  ‘Certainly – if he’d eaten too much chicken pie for his lunch,’ Marion said. ‘Edith, I do wish you would stop talking for once.’

  A few tears were trickling down Edith’s pudgy cheek. Why was it, Irma wondered, that God made some people so plain and disagreeable and others beautiful and kind like Miranda; dear Miranda, bending down to stroke the child’s burning forehead with a cool hand. An unreasoning tender love, of the kind sometimes engendered by Papa’s best French champagne or the melancholy cooing of pigeons on a Spring afternoon, filled her heart to overflowing. A love that included Marion, waiting with a flinty smile for Miranda to have done with Edith’s nonsense. Tears sprang to her eyes, but not of sorrow. She had no desire to weep. Only to love, and shaking out her ringlets she got up off the rock where she had been lying in the shade and began to dance. Or rather to float away, over the warm smooth stones. All except Edith had taken off their stockings and shoes. She danced barefoot, the little pink toes barely skimming the surface like a ballerina with curls and ribbons flying and bright unseeing eyes. She was at Covent Garden where she had been taken by her grandmother at the age of six, blowing kisses to admirers in the wings, tossing a flower from her bouquet into the stalls. At last she sank into a full-blown curtsey to the Royal Box, half way up a gum tree. Edith, leaning against a boulder, was pointing at Miranda and Marion, making their way up the next little rise. ‘Irma. Just look at them. Where in the world do they think they’re going without their shoes?’ To her annoyance Irma only laughed. Edith said crossly, ‘They must be mad.’ Such abandoned folly would always be beyond the understanding of Edith and her kind, who early in life take to woollen bed-socks and galoshes. Looking towards Irma for moral support, she was horrified to see that she too had picked up her shoes and stockings and was slinging them at her waist.

  Miranda was a little ahead as all four girls pushed on through the dogwoods with Edith trudging in the rear. They could see her straight yellow hair swinging loose above her thrusting shoulders, cleaving wave after wave of dusty green. Until at last the bushes began thinning out before the face of a little cliff that held the last light of the sun. So on a million summer evenings would the shadows lengthen upon the crags and pinnacles of the Hanging Rock.

  The semi-circular shelf on which they presently came out had much the same conformation as the one lower down, ringed with boulders and loose stones. Clumps of rubbery ferns motionless in the pale light cast no shadows upon the carpet of dry grey moss. The plain below was just visible; infinitely vague and distant. Peering down between the boulders Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures coming and going through drifts of rosy smoke, or mist. ‘Whatever can those people be doing down there like a lot of ants?’ Marion looked out over her shoulder. ‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Although it’s probable, of course, that they are performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.’ Irma was in no mood for one of Marion’s lectures. The ants and their business were dismissed without further comment. Although Irma was aware, for a little while, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums.

  Miranda was the first to see the monolith rising up ahead, a single outcrop of pock-marked stone, something like a monstrous egg perched above a precipitous drop to the plain. Marion, who had immediately produced a pencil and notebook, tossed them into the ferns and yawned. Suddenly overcome by an overpowering lassitude, all four girls flung themselves down on the gently sloping rock in the shelter of the monolith, and there fell into a sleep so deep that a horned lizard emerged from a crack to lie without fear in the hollow of Marion’s outflung arm.

  A procession of queer looking beetles in bronze armour were making a leisurely crossing of Miranda’s ankle when she awoke and watched them hurrying to safety under some loose bark. In the colourless twilight every detail stood out, clearly defined and separate. A huge untidy nest wedged in the fork of a stunted tree, its every twig and feather intricately laced and woven by tireless beak and claw. Everything if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete – the ragged nest, Marion’s torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell, Irma’s ringlets framing her face in exquisite wiry spirals – even Edith, flushed and childishly vulnerable in sleep. She awoke, whimpering and rubbing red-rimmed eyes. ‘Where am I? Oh, Miranda, I feel awful!’ The others were wide awake now and on their feet. ‘Miranda,’ Edith said again, ‘I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?’ Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking – sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet, Edith thought, instead of those nasty old stones. ‘Miranda,’ she called again. ‘Miranda!’ In the breathless silence her voice seemed to belong to somebody else, a long way off, a harsh little croak fading out amongst the rocky walls. ‘Come back, all of you! Don’t go up there – come back!’ She felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace collar. ‘Miranda!’ The strangled cry came out as a whisper. To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith. ‘Miranda! Come back!’ She took a few unsteady steps towards the rise and saw the last of a white sleeve parting the bushes ahead.

  ‘Miranda . . .!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loudly now, to scream. If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day. Nobody did hear them. The wallaby sprang up in alarm and bounded away, as Edith turned back, plunged blindly into the scrub and ran, stumbling and screaming, towards the plain.

  * The picture Miranda remembered was ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1875’ by William Ford, now hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria.

  4

  About four o’clock in the afternoon of the Picnic, Mrs Appleyard awoke from a long luxurious nap on the drawing-room sofa. She had been dreaming, as she often did, of her late husband. This time they were walking along the Pier at Bournemouth, where a number of pleasure craft and fishing boats were tied up. ‘Let us go for a sail, my dear,’ said Arthur. A fourposter bed with an old-fashioned box mattress was bobbing about on the waves. ‘Let us swim for it,’ said Arthur, and taking her arm dived into the sea. To her surprise and pleasure she found herself swimming beautifully, cutting through the water like a fish, without using her legs or arms. They had just reached the fourposter and were climbing on board when the sound of Whitehead running the lawnmower under the window put an
end to the delightful dream. How Arthur would have revelled in the respectable luxuries of life at Appleyard College! He had always, she remembered complacently, called her his financial genius. Already the College was paying handsome dividends . . . A few minutes later, still in the best of tempers, and determined to be gracious on this pleasant holiday afternoon, she appeared at the schoolroom door. ‘Well, Sara, I hope you have learned your poetry so that you can go into the garden for the rest of the afternoon. Minnie shall bring you some tea and cake.’

  The scraggy, big-eyed child who had automatically risen from the desk when the Headmistress entered, was shifting uneasily from one black stockinged spindle-shank to another. ‘Well? Stand up straight when you answer me, please, and put your shoulders back. You are getting a dreadful stoop. Now then. Have you got your lines by heart?’

  ‘It’s no use, Mrs Appleyard. I can’t learn them.’

  ‘How do you mean you can’t? Considering you have been alone in here with your Reader ever since luncheon?’

  ‘I have tried,’ said the child, passing her hand over her eyes. ‘But it’s so silly. I mean if there was any sense in it I could learn it ever so much better.’

  ‘Sense? You little ignoramus! Evidently you don’t know that Mrs Felicia Hemans is considered one of the finest of our English poets.’

  Sara scowled her disbelief of Mrs Hemans’ genius. An obstinate difficult child. ‘I know another bit of poetry by heart. It has ever so many verses. Much more than “The Hesperus”. Would that do?’

  ‘Hhm . . . What is this poem called?’

  ‘“An Ode to Saint Valentine”.’ For a moment the little pointed face brightened; looked almost pretty.

  ‘I am not acquainted with it,’ said the Headmistress, with due caution. (One couldn’t in her position be too careful; so many quotations turned out to be Tennyson or Shakespeare.) ‘Where did you find it, Sara – this, er, Ode?’

  ‘I didn’t find it. I wrote it.’

  ‘You wrote it? No, I don’t wish to hear it, thank you. Strange as it may seem, I prefer Mrs Hemans’. Give me your book and proceed to recite to me as far as you have gone.’

  ‘I tell you, I can’t learn that silly stuff if I sit here for a week.’

  ‘Then you must go on trying a little longer,’ said the Head, handing over the Reader, outwardly calm and reasonable, and sick to death of the sullen tight-lipped child. ‘I shall leave you now, Sara, and expect you to be word perfect when I send Miss Lumley in half an hour. Otherwise, I am afraid I shall have to send you to bed instead of sitting up until the others return for supper after the picnic.’ The schoolroom door closed, the key turned in the lock, the hateful presence swept from the room.

  Out in the gay green garden beyond the schoolroom the bed of dahlias glowed as if they were on fire, caught by the late afternoon sun. At the Hanging Rock, Mademoiselle and Miranda would be pouring out tea under the trees . . . Resting her heavy head on the inkstained lid of the desk the child Sara burst into wild angry sobs. ‘I hate her . . . I hate her . . . Oh, Bertie, Bertie, where are you? Jesus, where are you? If you are really watching the sparrows fall like it says in the Bible, why don’t you come down and take me away? Miranda says I mustn’t hate people even if they are wicked. I can’t help it, darling Miranda . . . I hate her! I hate her!’ There was a scrape of the desk on the floorboards as Mrs Hemans went hurtling towards the locked door.

  The sun had gone down in a blaze of theatrical pink and orange behind the College tower. Mrs Appleyard had eaten a substantial supper on a tray in her study: cold chicken, Stilton cheese and chocolate mousse. Meals at the College were unfailingly excellent. Sara had been sent to bed dry-eyed and unrepentant with a plate of cold mutton and a glass of milk. In the lamp-lit kitchen Cook and a couple of the maids were playing cards at the scrubbed wooden table, capped and aproned ready for the imminent return of the picnickers.

  The night gradually darkened and thickened. The tall almost empty house for once had fallen silent, filled with shadows, even after Minnie had lighted the lamps on the cedar staircase where Venus, with one hand strategically placed upon her marble belly, gazed through the landing window at her namesake pendant above the dim lawns. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock. Mrs Appleyard, playing patience in her study, with one ear cocked for the sound of the drag coming up the gravel drive, decided to ask Mr Hussey to step inside for a glass of brandy . . . there was still enough left in the decanter since the Bishop of Bendigo had lunched at the College.

  Mr Hussey, over several years of experience, had proved himself so punctual and entirely reliable that at half past eight by the grandfather clock on the stairs, the Headmistress rose from the card table and pulled the velvet cord of her private bell, that jangled with authority in the kitchen. It was immediately answered by Minnie, rather red in the face. Mrs Appleyard, from whom the housemaid stood at a respectful distance in the doorway, noted with disapproval the crooked cap. ‘Is Tom about still, Minnie?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum, I’ll ask Cook,’ said Minnie, who had last seen her adored Tom half an hour ago, stretched out in his underpants on the truckle bed in her attic room.

  ‘Well, see if you can find him and send him to me as soon as you do.’

  After two or three more rounds of Miss Milligan, Mrs Appleyard, who normally despised the luxury of cheating at patience, deliberately dealt herself a necessary Knave of Hearts and went out on to the gravel sweep before the porch, where a lighted kerosene lantern swung from a metal chain. Against a cloudless dark blue sky the slate roofs of the College glimmered like silver. In one of the upstairs rooms a solitary light was burning behind a drawn blind: Dora Lumley, off duty and reading in bed.

  The scent of stocks and sundrenched petunias was overpowering on the windless air. At least the night was fine and Mr Hussey a driver of high renown. All the same she wished young Tom could be found, if only to agree with his Irish commonsense that there was nothing to worry about in the drag being nearly an hour late. She went back to the study and began another game of patience, getting up almost at once to compare her gold watch with the clock in the hall. When it struck for half past nine she rang for Minnie again, and was informed that Tom was taking a hot bath in the coach house and would be there ‘directly’. Another ten minutes dragged by.

  At last came the beat of hooves on the highroad, perhaps half a mile away . . . now they were crossing over the culvert . . . she could see lights moving on the dark trees. A chorus of drunken voices as the vehicle gathered speed on the flat road and passed the College gates at a fast trot – a dragload of revellers returning from Woodend. At the same moment Tom, who had heard them too, presented himself in carpet slippers and a clean shirt at the open door. If Mrs Appleyard had a liking for anyone in her immediate orbit it was surely merry-eyed Irish Tom. No matter what was asked of him, from emptying the pig bucket to playing a tune on the mouthorgan for the maids, or driving the drawing mistress to the Woodend Station, it was all the same to Tom. ‘Yes, Ma’am? You were after wanting me, so Minnie was saying?’

  Under the unshaded light of the porch the heavy folded cheeks were the colour of tallow. ‘Tom,’ said Mrs Appleyard, looking him full in the face as if to screw an answer out of him with her gimlet eyes, ‘do you realize that Mr Hussey is shockingly late?’

  ‘Is that a fact, Ma’am?’

  ‘He promised me faithfully this morning to have them back here by eight o’clock. It is now half past ten. How long would you say it takes to drive from the Hanging Rock?’

  ‘Well, it’s a fair step from here . . .’

  ‘Think carefully, please. You are familiar with the roads.’

  ‘Say three to three and a half hours and you wouldn’t be far out.’

  ‘Exactly. Hussey intended to leave the Picnic Grounds soon after four o’clock. Directly after tea.’ The carefully modulated College voice became suddenly raucous. ‘Don’t stand there gaping at me like an idiot! What do you think has happened?’

  In th
e lilting Irish singsong that fluttered many a female heart beside his Minnie’s, Tom was soothing at her side. If the distraught face had been reasonably kissable, he might even have dared a conciliatory peck on the flaccid cheek, unpleasantly close to his well scrubbed nose. ‘Now don’t you be distressing yourself, Ma’am. It’s five grand horses he’s driving and him the best coachman this side of Bendigo.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know all that? The point is – have they had an accident?’

  ‘An accident, Ma’am? Well, now, I never so much as gave it a thought, such a fine night and all . . .’

  ‘Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought! I know nothing of horses but they can bolt. Do you hear me, Tom? Horses can bolt. For God’s sake, say something!’ It was one thing for Tom to stall and cajole in the kitchen. Quite another here in the front porch with the Headmistress standing over him twice as large as life with her tall black shadow behind her on the wall . . . ‘Ready to eat me she looked,’ he told Minnie afterwards, ‘and the devil of it was I knew in my bones the poor creature was right.’ Greatly daring he put a hand on one grey silk wrist encircled by a heavy bracelet from which hung a blood red heart. ‘If you’d come inside and sit down for a wee while, Minnie can bring you a cup of tea . . .’

  ‘Listen! What’s that? God be praised, I can hear them now!’

  It was the truth, at last: hooves on the highroad, two advancing lights, the blessed scrape of wheels as the drag came slowly to a halt at the College gates. ‘Woa there Sailor . . . Duchess get over . . .’ Mr Hussey talking to his horses in a voice almost unrecognizably hoarse. From the dark mouth of the drag the passengers came straggling out one by one into the light of the carriage lamps fanning out on to the gravel drive. Some crying, some sodden with sleep, all hatless, dishevelled, incoherent. Tom had gone bounding off down the drive at the first hint of the drag’s approach, leaving the Headmistress to dragoon her trembling limbs into a commanding stance on the porch. First to come stumbling towards her up the shallow steps was the Frenchwoman, ashen under the light.