Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Her heart was beating too fast. It fought to free itself from the magnetic restrictions of her belt. It wanted to go wild, on its own loud boastful erratic dance.

Henry Lightfoot entered the Commercial Room. He was aptly named. He walked on the balls of his feet, and she saw that he was already a little drunk. It was not like him to be drunk, but she was pleased he was drunk. She hoped he was drunk enough to ask her to the ball.

He smiled at her; he did not come to the bar immediately but joined the ruddy pipe-smoking Scot from Elders and the round-shouldered man from the Courier Mail. His mind did not appear to be on the conversation he was having. He rocked back and forwards on his shining black shoes which showed only the faintest smear of sale-yard mud.

When he came, at last, to the bar, he was carrying his companions' empty glasses. He was smiling, but she was too excited to look closely at his smile.

She blushed.

Had she not been so intent on trying to stop the blush she might have looked more closely at his face and she might have detected a malice in the smile which the men who had dealings with Henry Lightfoot knew to be part of his character. He was both handsome and charming, but he was also a bully with a keen nose for weakness.

He stood at the bar, jingling the loose change in his pocket, swaying gently. His smile was moist, his handsome mouth a little slack.

Molly's red hair was piled handsomely high, and although it accentuated a tendency towards jowliness, it also showed the soft white skin of her neck. There was nothing to hide her blush.

"You've been keeping a secret from me, Miss Rourke," said Henry Lightfoot.

"No," she said, "I promise you," but blushed even deeper, because she had confessed her hopes about the ball to Jenny Grillet.

"It's not a secret," Henry Lightfoot said. "It is too wonderful", he teased, "to be a secret. It is too extraordinary. No, no, dear Molly Rourke, 'tis no secret any more."

He had never called her Molly before. The blush spread down her neck until it seemed it would take possession of her shoulders.

"Everybody," he said, "all Ballarat knows."

"Oh," she dared look up. She held him with her bright green eyes. "And do they now, Mr Lightfoot?"

"Indeed, Miss Rourke. Indeed they do."

"And what secret is this?"

"They say", he whispered, "you wear a belt to stop you going mad."

She did not leave the bar. She stayed working. She gave correct change. She counted the money in the till at closing time. She helped Patchy wash the glasses in the public bar.

I had this in common with Molly: we had both pretended our fathers dead, although for different reasons. And while Jack had heard of Mrs Ester, he knew nothing of her father or Walter or Sean. He knew nothing of the electric belt, Dr Grigson, or that Molly had risked her mortal soul by marrying him in a Protestant church.

And although there were many times when she came, teetering, giddy, her hand in his, to the very brink of confessing her faith, she could not. He made it impossible. He had no time for Catholics. This is not to say that he would not, journeying down to Colac to visit his backers, make a detour to Koroit, that Catholic town, drink in the pub and be a good fellow amidst Murphys and Keoghs and Hanrahans, but that he carried a schoolboy's prejudices with him and was always only a hairbreadth away from those sing-song insults that Protestant children call out to the Catholics on the other side of dusty streets: "Catholic dogs sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs." He was for Australia and the Empire, had voted Yes to conscription and regarded Archbishop Mannix as nothing less than a traitor.

And in Cocky Abbot, that dimple-chinned, ruddy-faced giant, he found a kindred spirit. They could relax together, in their certainties. They were both big strong men in their fifties, men who had begun life poor and ended up rich. They trusted each other's money. They trusted each other's size and their hands, when shaking, fitted together like two halves of the one puzzle. They were, as the farmer put it, practical.

They sat together on the veranda of the Abbots' homestead late in the afternoon and rolled up their sleeves in defiance of the chill in the evening air. Had you seen them, sitting on their rattan chairs, you would have shared their conceit, that they were two of a kind, and you would be wrong. For the farmer was a harder, tougher man, ruthless in a bargain and with a head for figures not suggested by his slow countryman's drawl.

"This aviator bloke," Cocky Abbot asked, kicking off his boots in a manner Jack approved of, "is he practical?"

The autumn rain had turned the landscape green but at six in the evening it was laid over with a rich golden mist; the farmer's sheep looked like splendid creatures, not the daggy-bummed animals Jack McGrath loathed.

"Is he practical?" mused Jack. "I'd say so, yes, my word I would."

"I'd say there was a definite quid to be made in this business."

"That's his point."

"But my question to you, Jacko, is this: why would we need to go to the expense of building a factory? Now look at your costs. Three hundred pounds for the land. Say another three hundred pounds to put up some sort of shed. Then you've got your labour. You need specialists, I take it, skilled men, mechanics, fitters and turners and so on. Before you've got a penny coming in you're probably up for, call it two thousand pounds."

"This is right, Harold."

"And who's to say you have the best aeroplane? We won't know until it's built and flown."

"That's true," said Jack, but looked miserable, passing his hand over his folded face. "But everything's a risk. Life is a risk."

"Life is a risk, you're right, man. But we've both got where we are by not taking more than we need. Now what does your aviator say to importing a craft?"

"I never asked him, but his point is that we have an Australian plane."

"For Heaven's sake, we're all in the Empire together. I meant a British plane. One we know will fly. Do you follow me? It's a question of risk versus return, and there's no doubt the poms are more experienced than we are. My suggestion to you is: why wouldn't we set up an agency for the best craft available?"

"Talk to Badgery. Talk to him. Listen to him."

"I'll listen to him," said Cocky Abbot. "I'd like to meet him anyway. I believe I knew his father. There was a Badgery here in '96. Tried to sell us a cannon."

"That's the man all right, that's him."

"An interesting man," said Cocky Abbot. "I often think we made a great mistake not listening to him."

The electric belt that had saved Molly now damned her. It forced her to flee Ballarat with cheeks still burning and eyes downcast before her fellow coach passengers.

Molly had laboured late into the panicked night, filling five pages with her careful copperplate, but she could not bring herself to be precise about her shame which was, to spell it out, that all of Ballarat was peeking, smirking, at what lay underneath her skirts. Her father went over and over his daughter's letter, searching with his blunt broken fingernail for a place where he might get a purchase. The pages, however, would give up no secrets and remained as mysterious and inviolate as marble eggs.

Melbourne frightened Molly. It was too noisy, too grand. She sought a country position. Had she waited – she had money enough – she might have found a position in a good Catholic hotel. But she could not wait. She must have it settled. In all of the state of Victoria, it seemed, there was only one position, that of barmaid at the Grand Hotel in Point's Point. Sensing, correctly, that her faith would go against her, she told the employment agency that she was not a Catholic.