Picnic at Hanging Rock Read online

  The memory of Arthur standing at her elbow as he often did while she struggled with a difficult piece of correspondence wiped the elegant guardian from her mind. All this was getting her nowhere. With something like a groan she took up a thin steel-nibbed pen and began to write. First to the Leopolds, undoubtedly the most impressive parents on the College register: fabulously rich and moving in the best international society, but now in India where Mr Leopold was buying polo ponies from a Rajah in Bengal. According to Irma’s last letter, her parents would at this moment be somewhere in the Himalayas, on a frantic expedition with elephants and palanquins and silk embroidered tents; address, for at least a fortnight, unknown. At last the letter was completed to the writer’s satisfaction – a judicious blend of sympathy and practical commonsense. Not too much sympathy in case by the time it was received the whole damnable business had been satisfactorily cleared up and Irma back at school. A problem, too, whether or not to touch on the black tracker and the bloodhound. . . . She could almost hear Arthur’s ‘Masterly, my dear, masterly.’ And so, according to its purpose, we may be sure it was.

  Next in order of precedence came Miranda’s mother and father, owners of vast cattle stations in the backblocks of Northern Queensland. Not quite in the millionaire class but entrenched in a setting of solid wealth and well-being as members of one of Australia’s best known pioneer families. Exemplary parents who could be relied on not to fuss over trifles of missed trains or an epidemic of measles at the College; but in this preposterous situation as unpredictable as anyone else. Miranda was the only girl, the eldest of five children, and, well Mrs Appleyard knew it, the apple of her parents’ eyes. The whole family had been staying at St Kilda during the Christmas holidays, but had returned last month to the luxurious isolation of Goonawingi. Only a few days ago Miranda had happened to mention that the Goonawingi mail arrived with the stores, sometimes only once in four or five weeks. However, one could never be sure, thought the Headmistress, sucking on the nib, that some busybody of a visitor wouldn’t come riding over with the newspapers and let the cat out of the mail bag. As will have been noted Mrs Appleyard was not prone to sentiment, yet this was the hardest letter she had ever been obliged to write in her whole life. As she gummed down the flap of the envelope the closely written pages proclaimed themselves the messengers of doom. She shrugged: ‘I am becoming fanciful’, and took a nip or two of brandy from the cupboard behind the desk.

  Marion Quade’s lawful guardian was a family solicitor, very much in the background except for the payment of Marion’s fees. By good fortune he was at present in New Zealand, on a fishing trip at some inaccessible lake. In Mrs Appleyard’s hearing, her guardian had lately been referred to by Marion as a ‘dodderer’. With the fervent hope that the solicitor would live up to his reputation and let sleeping dogs lie until further information came to hand, the letter was signed and sealed. And finally, another to the octogenarian father of Greta McCraw, living alone with his dog and his Bible on a remote island in the Hebrides. The old man was unlikely to make trouble or even communicate, having never penned his daughter a line since her arrival in Australia as a girl of eighteen. All four letters were stamped and laid on the hall table for Tom to post on tonight’s train.

  6

  On the afternoon of Thursday, February the nineteenth, Michael Fitzhubert and Albert Crundall were seated in amicable silence before a bottle of Ballarat Bitter in the little rustic boathouse fronting Colonel Fitzhubert’s ornamental lake. Albert was off duty for an hour or two and Mike was taking a temporary respite from assisting at his aunt’s annual garden party. The Lake was deep and dark, icy cold despite the languorous summer heat, overgrown at one end with waterlilies whose creamy cups caught and held the rays of the late afternoon sun. On a patch of lily pads a single white swan was standing on one coral leg, now and then sending out showers of concentric ripples across the surface of the lake. On the opposite side, banks of treeferns and blue hydrangea mingled with the natural forest rising steeply behind the low verandahed house on whose lawns the guests were strolling under the elms and oaks. Two maids behind a trestle table were serving strawberries and cream: it was rather a smart party, including guests from nearby Government Cottage, the summer residence of the State Governor, with a hired footman, three musicians from Melbourne and plenty of French champagne. There had earlier been talk of putting the coachman into a tight black jacket for service at the champagne bar to which Albert had replied that he was hired to look after the horses. ‘As I said to your Uncle, “I’m a coachman, sir, not a bloody waiter”.’ Mike laughed. ‘You look like a sailor, with those mermaids and things tattooed all over your arms.’

  ‘A sailor done them for me, in Sydney. Wanted to do me chest, too, but I ran out of cash. Pity. I was only fifteen . . .’

  Transported to a world where boys of fifteen cheerfully spent their last shilling on being thus disfigured for life, Mike gazed at his friend with something like awe. He himself at fifteen had been hardly more than a child with a shilling a week pocket money and another for ‘the plate’ on Sunday mornings . . . Since the afternoon of the picnic a comfortable non-demanding friendship had developed between the two young men. To see them now – Albert loose of limb in rolled-up shirt sleeves and moleskin trousers. Michael stiff in garden party attire with a carnation in his buttonhole – they looked an ill-assorted pair. ‘Mike’s all right,’ Albert had told his friend the cook. ‘Him and me are mates.’ And so in the finest sense of that much abused word, they were. The fact that Albert, who had just tried his friend’s grey topper on his own tousled bullet head, looked like a music hall turn; and that Mike in Albert’s wide brimmed greasy sundowner might have stepped from the pages of The Magnet or the Boys Own Paper, meant less than nothing. As did the accident of birth that had rendered one of them almost illiterate, and the other barely articulate, at the age of twenty – a Public School education being by no means a guarantee of adult expression. In each other’s presence, neither young man was conscious of his shortcomings, if such they were.

  There was a cosy sense of mutual understanding, and not too much talk. Topics of conversation were mainly of local interest, when they arose; the mare’s off hind leg which Albert was painting with Stockholm tar, or the Colonel’s obstinate enthusiasm for the time-wasting rose garden that called for more bloody weeding than an acre of spuds and anyway what was the good of all them roses? Neither had anything much in the way of embarrassing political, or for that matter any other kind of convictions, which they would have recognized as their own if shown them written down in cold print. Which in friendship makes everything simpler. There was no obstructive nonsense, for instance, in Mike’s father being a Conservative member of the English House of Lords, while Albert’s, when last heard of, was an itinerant rouse-about, in perpetual strife with the Boss of the Shed. For Albert, young Fitzhubert was the ideal companion, sitting silently for hours on an upturned chaff box in the stable yard, drinking in the other’s native wisdom and wit. Some of Albert’s more hair-raising anecdotes were true, others not. It made no odds. For Mike, the coachman’s free-roving conversation was a continual source of pleasurable instruction, not only about life in general but Australia. In the Lake View kitchen, the Honorable Michael, a member of one of the oldest and richest families in the United Kingdom, was commonly referred to as ‘that poor English bastard’: an expression of genuine compassion for one who obviously had so much to learn. ‘Cripes,’ said Cook, whose wages were considered good at twenty-five shillings a week, ‘I wouldn’t be him, not for a cartload of nuggets.’ Meanwhile, in the drawing-room Mike was telling his Uncle and Aunt, ‘Albert’s such a jolly good chap. And so clever. I can’t tell you what a lot he knows about all sorts of things.’

  ‘Hmm. I don’t doubt it,’ the Colonel agreed with a wink. ‘Rough as bags, young Crundall, but no fool and a first-rate man with the horses.’ His wife sniffed, almost breathing in the hay and horse dung. ‘I can’t imagine that Crundall’s conversation wo
uld be exactly edifying.’

  In the cool peace of the boathouse this afternoon there was precious little conversation, edifying or otherwise, what with the bottle of cold beer and the lake to look out upon, placid under its pattern of slowly lengthening shadows. In the distance ‘The Blue Danube’ drifted over the water from the rose garden as the party grew ever duller and cooler. The roses, admired to excess, were no longer conversationally adequate. The Colonel, with two or three chosen males, had retreated under the weeping elm armed with tumblers of Scotch and soda, while Mrs Fitzhubert held the rest of the party together as best she could on lemonade.

  ‘Confound it – it’s gone five already.’ Michael was reluctantly unwinding his long legs under the table. ‘I promised my Aunt I’d show Miss Stack the rose garden before they go.’

  ‘Stack? That the one with a pair of legs on her like champagne bottles?’

  Mike had no idea, the unknown Miss Stack’s legs being of no moment whatsoever.

  ‘I seen her getting out of the Government Cottage dog-cart this afternoon. Jeez, that reminds me – the groom was telling me the cops had the bloodhounds out at Hanging Rock again today.’

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed the other sitting down again. ‘What for? Have they found anything new?’

  ‘No bloody fear! What I say is this: if them Russell Street blokes and the abo tracker and the bloody dog can’t find ’em, what’s the sense of you and me worrying our guts out? (We may as well finish the bottle.) Plenty of other people have got themselves bushed before today and as far as I’m concerned that’s the stone end of it.’

  Mike was staring out at the shining disc of the lake. He said slowly: ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s not the end of it. I wake up in a cold sweat every night wondering if they’re still alive dying of thirst somewhere on that infernal Rock at this very minute . . . while you and I are sitting here drinking cold beer.’ If Michael’s young sisters had heard the low impassioned voice, so different to his usual clipped and breezy utterance, they would hardly have recognized the brother whose confidences at home, if any, were reserved for an elderly cocker spaniel.

  ‘That’s where you and me is different,’ Albert was saying. ‘If you take my advice, the sooner you forget the whole thing the better.’

  ‘I can’t forget it, I never will.’

  The white swan, poised all this time on the lily pads, now chose to stretch one pink leg and then the other and go flapping away across the lake towards the opposite bank. The two young men watched its flight in silence until it disappeared amongst the reeds.

  ‘Ah, they’re pretty birds all right, them swans,’ Albert breathed. ‘Beautiful,’ Mike said, miserably aware of the strange young woman awaiting him in the rose garden. Painfully he unwound his long pin-striped legs from under the rustic seat, stood up, blew his nose, lit a cigarette, got as far as the door of the boathouse, stopped and turned round again.

  ‘Listen,’ Albert said. ‘I’m no great shakes on music but isn’t that “God Save the Queen”? The Gov. must be leaving.’

  ‘I don’t care if he is . . . there’s something I must say to you but I don’t know how to begin.’ Albert had never seen him look so serious. ‘As a matter of fact . . . I’ve been working out a plan –’

  ‘It’ll keep,’ Albert said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Better hop it, hadn’t you? Your Auntie’ll raise Hell if you’re not on show.’

  ‘Confound my Aunt. The point is, it won’t keep. It’s now or never to be any use. You know that bridle track you were telling me about yesterday?’ Albert nodded. ‘You mean the one takes you down to the plains on our side of the Mount?’

  ‘I daresay it sounds a wild goose chase to you and maybe it is but I don’t care. I’ve decided to make a search of the Rock on my own, in my own way. No police. No bloodhounds. Just you and me. That is if you’ll come along and show me the ropes. We could take the Arab and Lancer, get off to an early start, and be home here for dinner without any awkward questions. Now then – I’ve got it off my chest. How about it?’

  ‘Barmy. Nuts. You run along and show Miss Bottle Legs them roses and you and me have a yarn about it some other time.’

  ‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking,’ said the other with such bitterness that Albert was quite shaken. ‘Hi, wait a bit, Mike! I was only meaning –’

  ‘You’re thinking: poor bastard’s a new chum in the Bush and so on. Hell, I know all that but it doesn’t matter. I lied to you just now about a plan. It’s really not so much a plan as a feeling.’ Albert’s eyebrows flew up but he said nothing. ‘All my life I’ve been doing things because other people said they were the right things to do. This time I’m going to do something because I say so – even if you and everyone else thinks I’m mad.’

  ‘It’s like this,’ Albert said, ‘feelings is all very well but every inch of that bloody Rock has been gone over with a toothcomb. What the Hell do you think you can do?’

  ‘Then I’ll be going alone,’ Mike said.

  ‘Who says you’re going alone. We’re mates, aren’t we?’

  ‘Then you will?’

  ‘Of course I will, you big dope – Aw, cut it out. It won’t take much fixing. We don’t want nothing but a bit of tucker for you and me and a feed for the two horses. When do you reckon we go?’

  ‘Tomorrow if you can get away.’

  Tomorrow was Friday and Albert’s day off, long dedicated to a cockfight in Woodend. ‘No, never you mind about that. . . . How early can you start?’

  Mrs Fitzhubert’s lace parasol could be seen wobbling towards them above the hydrangea hedge and it was hastily agreed to meet at the stable tomorrow morning at half past five.

  Now at last the Lake View lawns were deserted, the marquee dismantled, the trestle tables carried away into storage for another year. A few sleepy starlings were still gossiping in the tallest trees as the pink silk-shaded lamps of Mrs Fitzhubert’s drawing-room broke into a rosy glow.

  Out at the Hanging Rock the long violet shadows were tracing their million-year-old pattern of summer evenings across its secret face. Turning their weary blue serge backs upon its magnificent spectacle of gilded peaks slowly darkening upon a turquoise sky, the police party climbed into the waiting vehicle and was driven swiftly towards the familiar comforts of the Woodend Hotel. Constable Bumpher for one had had a bellyful of the Rock and its mysteries and was looking forward with understandable pleasure to a couple of beers and a nice juicy steak.

  In spite of glorious weather and congenial company, it had proved a thoroughly unrewarding day. In view of the belated evidence of the girl Horton – if evidence it could be called – the search had been immediately intensified, including the recall of the bloodhound, who had been furnished with a piece of calico from Miss McCraw’s underwear. There seemed no reason to doubt that Edith had actually seen and passed the mathematics teacher making her way up the Rock in white calico drawers. The vague wordless encounter, however, remained unsubstantiated; nor was it ever established if Miss McCraw had experienced an equally fleeting vision of the terrified girl. Some slight disturbance of the bushes and bracken towards the western end of the rock face had been noted as early as last Sunday morning. It was now thought possible they might have been part of the track taken by Miss McCraw after leaving the rest of the party after lunch. It petered out almost at once; strangely enough, at much the same level of striated rock as certain other faint scratchings and bruisings of the undergrowth at the eastern end where the four girls may have begun their perilous ascent. All day long the bloodhound had sniffed and fossicked its delicate way through thick dusty scrub and sun-baked rocks and stones. The dog, who had proved equally unsuccessful at picking up the scent of the three missing girls earlier in the week, was greatly hampered by the well-meaning army of voluntary searchers having effaced the first elusive imprints where a hand had rested perhaps on a dusty boulder, a foot on springy moss. The animal, however, did raise some false hopes during Thursday afternoon, by standing for nearly ten min
utes growling and bristling on an almost circular platform of flat rock considerably further towards the summit, whereon the magnifying glass disclosed absolutely no signs of any disturbance more recent than the ravages of Nature over some hundreds or thousands of years. Bumpher, scanning his meagre notes in the failing light of the cab, had hoped that part or all of the teacher’s purple silk cape would have been found stuffed into a hollow log, maybe, or under a loose rock. ‘Beats me what the old girl could have done with it! Considering hundreds of people have been traipsing about in the scrub ever since Sunday last. Let alone the dog.’

  Meanwhile, like most other dwellers on the Mount this evening, Colonel Fitzhubert and his nephew were discussing the recall of the bloodhound. Mrs Fitzhubert, worn out with the rigours of hospitality, had retired to bed. The Colonel was bitterly disappointed about the bloodhound. He had pinned his faith on it from the beginning and felt almost personally let down by its failure to come up with a clue. ‘’Pon my word,’ he remarked to his nephew over the dinner table, ‘I’m beginning to think this thing’s gone too far for dogs or anything else. Be a week this coming Saturday since those poor girls disappeared. Have a glass of port? Most likely dead as mutton by now at the bottom of one of those infernal precipices.’ The old boy appeared so genuinely concerned that Mike was tempted to confide his plans for tomorrow’s expedition to the Hanging Rock. Aunt, however, would be sure to raise a thousand objections. After fiddling in silence with the walnuts he asked if he could have the Arab for the day on Friday? ‘It’s Albert’s day off, you know, and he says he wants to take me for a fairly long ride.’

  ‘By all means. Where do you think of going?’

  Always a half-hearted liar, even in trifles, Mike muttered something about the Camel’s Hump. ‘Splendid! Crundall knows this country like the back of his hand. He’ll see you get some good soft going for a gallop. If it wasn’t for my Rose Show Committee tomorrow afternoon I might have joined you myself.’ (God bless the Rose Show!) ‘And don’t be late for dinner,’ the Colonel added. ‘You know how your Aunt fusses.’ Mike did know and promised faithfully to be back at Lake View by seven at least.