48

Jack McGrath scraped the last of the bread-and-butter pudding from his plate and gulped his scalding tea down his throat. He was in no mood for small talk, but a meal was a meal and hospitality must be offered. He thumped his big foot beneath the table and folded his crumpled napkin several times. He did not notice my mood. He was too concerned to get the subject started, to flick off the rubber band, and bring the talk around to factories and their construction. He was ready to explain how he would buy himself a team and bring the timbers out of the bush, who would mill it, who would season it. He wished to be practical. But Oswald-Smith wanted to discuss rabbits, so rabbits it would have to be, and all Jack could do was thump his foot and scald himself with steam from the electric kettle, the flex of which his anxious wife had wound around her wrist.

While Phoebe squeezed her mother's perspiring hand, Oswald-Smith chose to argue in favour of the rabbit. He was one of those men who like a talk so much he will take a contrary position just to get things started.

Jack, whose teams had ripped many an acre of land riddled with rabbit burrows, burying them, cutting them, suffocating them, was shocked to hear a successful farmer speak of rabbits in such terms.

I knew what Oswald-Smith was doing. He was getting me to talk and he laid his argument before me like a fisherman will drop a mud eye, ever so gently, and let it float downstream where a brown trout, old enough and smart enough to refuse such blatant tricks, takes the damn thing anyway.

"I'd have to say, Mr Smith," I said, uncoiling my long bowed legs and stretching back in my chair, "that you are talking rot."

Jack tried to flatten his creased napkin with the edge of his fist, back and forth like a widowed ironing woman.

"The rabbit has no place in this country," I said. "The things that will ruin this country are things like the rabbit."

The things that I had in mind were the Oswald-Smiths and the Cocky Abbots.

"Yes," said Oswald-Smith pleasantly. "Please go on."

"That's it. Nothing else to say. The rabbit is a mongrel of a thing."

I had said nothing new but they were all, except Jack who continued to iron his napkin, ridiculously pleased with me for having said it. It wasn't so much that the subject was rabbits, but that I was addressing myself to it in a definite manner. I could see that the Cocky Abbots were pleased that I was speaking their thoughts.

Right in the middle of my irritation and confusion with everything I smelt a whiff of that interest that comes in every sale, like a wooden case cracking open to spill out honey: a heady, intoxicating aroma.

I tried to use this moment to cross the bridge from rabbits to aeroplanes, but the gap was wide and I misjudged the distance. "We're going to have our own animals," I said. I found myself in mid-air, not knowing exactly what I meant.

There was a silence as everybody tried to imagine what it was that I was trying to say.

"How do you mean?" asked Cocky Abbot Junior helpfully.

"Breed them," I said recklessly.

"How?" asked Oswald-Smith.

"How do you think?" I said so lewdly that Phoebe and Molly, for different reasons, grew bright red, and only Oswald-Smith, a man who enjoyed the picturesque, permitted himself a quick smile before his sense of diplomacy encouraged him to change the subject.

"I think", he said, "it's time we moved on to business."

"My word," cried Jack, and pushed back his chair loudly.

There was much fussing around as the women tried to clear the table and Molly became entangled in her wire and knocked over the stand of the electric kettle. She was close to tears as Phoebe untangled her but she wished us all luck before she left the room.

"Wireless," she whispered to her daughter. "I'll sit by the wireless."

Bridget removed the tablecloth and Jack stamped around distributing writing pads to his visitors. He was so agitated that even Cocky Abbot Senior realized that the aeroplane factory was more than a casual venture for him.

There seemed to be nothing to prevent a successful meeting. There appeared to be a positive excess of goodwill on the part of the investors. When Cocky Abbot Senior resumed his seat at the table he sat opposite Jack McGrath and winked at him like a conspirator.

I spread out the plans on the table. Bradfield's B3 was a beautiful craft and I had no trouble speaking enthusiastically about its function. I could feel some resistance from the older Cocky Abbot. I pushed against it with my enthusiasm. I discussed the purchase of steel from BHP and the method of bringing in timber from the bush. The young Cocky Abbot caught my eye and nodded. Oswald-Smith made notes on his writing pad. But the older farmer folded his arms against his chest and looked at me impassively.

The wind howled around the house and pushed its fingers under doors, through cracks in the floor, lifted rugs in the long passage so they rode the timber in ghostly waves. The women felt the wind and did not like it, but all I felt was this stubborn wall from Cocky Abbot Senior. I talked and talked, but I could not talk him down. I knew, before I sat down, that I had not made the sale.

"I knew your father," said Cocky Abbot Senior, unfolding his arms at last. "He was a practical man, so I suppose you are too. Now what I want to know, Badgery – and I mentioned this to Jack down at 'Bulgaroo' – why wouldn't we set ourselves up as agents and import the best the world has to offer? I don't doubt you when you say there's a future in the aircraft, but why should we risk all this capital to manufacture something when we can import the best the British Empire can produce?"

"What did Jack say?"

"He said you were a practical fellow."

I looked at Jack. He grinned at me fondly. I sucked in my breath and studied the wallpaper behind his shoulder. I tried to remind myself that the whole thing was only a lie except it was not a lie any more. It was an inch from being the shining thing I had described so lyrically.

"Mr Abbot," I said, "I've sold two hundred T Model Fords and it has made me a lot of dough, but it never made me happy."

The table was quiet. They heard the tremor in my voice and they knew how I felt, but they had no idea why I felt it or what I was saying.

"Happy!" snorted Cocky Abbot Junior.

"Does it make you happy", I asked him, "to be a child all your life? That's what an agent is, a child serving a parent. If you want to serve the interests of the English, you go and be an agent for their aircraft, and you'll stay a damn child all your life."

The younger Cocky Abbot sought his AIF badge on his lapel and, having found it, squinted at it down his long nose. Everybody waited for him. "And yet", he said, "you served the Empire."

"I never served," I said. "I had no intention of dying like a silly goat for the British."

Jack, who had loved every war service story I told him, recognized the voice of truth. His great face folded in misery.

"You're lucky you don't live in Colac," said young Cocky Abbot.

"Lucky indeed. I saw it from the air. It looks like a cow of a place."

"We tar and feather micks for saying things like that. Our mates died for England."

"My point," I shouted. "My point exactly."

"We tarred and feathered a bloke two weeks ago, a Sinn Feiner from Warrnambool. It was written up in all the papers. He wrote a poem you might approve of, in 1915."

"You are fools," I said, and said it so quietly, with such passion, that Cocky Abbot Junior, whose large red fist had been placed very prominently on his expensively trousered knee, dismantled it quietly, and put the pieces in his pocket.

For a trembling instant I had them all.

I had a full five seconds in which to say something, anything, to begin a sentence that might, with its passion and precision, convert them to my view.