Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller Page B

doors down either side leading off to the dining room, the kitchen, the study and the bedrooms. There were no windows. A subdued light penetrated from a louvred verandah which had been added by her father and which was separated from the living room by a fretworked blackwood screen. The room was furnished with heavy Edwardian pieces from Haddon Hill, the old cattle property out in the Suttor country. The low ceiling elaborately ornamented with geometric plaster designs, a heavy brass lamp on a chain hanging from a starburst of triangles at its centre. The stale, faintly disgusting smell of other people’s clothes. Other people’s lives. The anonymous, departed tenants. She would give the place a good spring-clean.
    She carried the stone to the end of the room and stood at the screen looking into the front verandah, wondering where to put it. She knew she should have the courage to accept Bo’s invitation and go with him to the playgrounds of the old people. She should do it, she knew that. She should face the consequences of knowing such things. Go to his heartland with him. For there surely would be consequences. It wouldn’t be a free ride. Nothing was ever a free ride. The verandah ran the full width of the house, its louvres giving directly onto the frontlawn and Zamia Street. Angled against one corner was her grandfather’s old squatter’s chair. An enormous heavy black thing, low to the ground, its timbers squared, the wide arms and leg-rests flat and uncompromising. Was there ever such a design conceived in any other culture, she wondered? It was a chair made for an exhausted man to rest in. Impossible to read a book in such a chair. Impossible for a woman wearing a skirt to sit in without being immodest. The chair and the low table beside it were piled with faded back issues of women’s magazines and newspapers, copies of the National Geographic . A stained Persian rug on the worn floorboards. She turned and surveyed the room. Dead insects, dust and cobwebs over everything, white cat hairs caught among the cobwebs. Annabelle turned to an Edwardian sideboard backed against the blackwood screen. On the marble an alabaster bust of Dante as a young man in the days of his Vita Nuova . Leaning against Dante a framed sepia photograph of her grandfather in the last months of his life. The old man stood in the paddock behind the homestead. He was wearing a black three-piece suit and a narrow-brimmed hat, just as Bo had remembered him. He was grinning, posed beside an enormous roan Shorthorn bullock, Paddy, the companion of the old cattleman’s senility. She heard a car turn into the drive and the slam of its door. She put the stone down beside her grandfather and leaned to see out the window.
    The voice of her sister called, ‘You in there Annie?’ Her sandals clattering on the front steps of the verandah.
    Annabelle went out onto the verandah and unbolted the front door. They embraced and kissed.
    ‘Christ, just look at you!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I knew you’d be here the minute he told me you’d gone. Why have you got your mobile switched off?’
    Annabelle surprised herself by saying firmly, ‘I’m not going back to him, Beth. So don’t start being an intermediary.’
    Elizabeth said, ‘He’ll crumple. He’ll be a hopeless mess without you.’
    ‘He should have thought of that before he went off fucking his honours students.’
    ‘You’re being brutal. He was mesmerised. She’s got big tits and beautiful thighs. What do you expect? He’s only a man. She shimmered at him. They can’t resist it. Anyway it’s over. It was a little burst of glory for him. He needs you now. You’re his reality.’
    ‘I never want to see him again.’
    ‘Grow up for God’s sake, Annie! He’s just had a little affair. None of us are perfect. You’ve got to let them have a bit of fun now and again.’
    ‘It’s not that. It’s not him I’m thinking of. It’s me. I’m suddenly free to decide things. I haven’t