Free Watching the Climbers on the Mountain by Alex Miller Page A

would be no carnival. She wanted the carnival to go ahead. Not only because she had a share of responsibility for it, but also because of the incident on the verandah.
    She watched the clouds rising and conjured up the cool damp wind after storm rain, imagining its passage through the house, the creaking and subsiding of wood and iron—as the heated fabric of the place released its stored tensions. She must have dozed then for the banging of the screen door roused her. She looked at her watch; it was almost four o’clock. She lay still listening. The house was silent. And at last she slept, her body relaxed. A sheen of sweat glistened along the contours of her tanned skin and glided down in runnels here and there to dampen the sheet beneath her. Her breathing was slow and even and she seemed at peace with herself. But still something within her resisted, and she dreamed a kaleidoscope of brief and disconnected images; images that withdrew in the first moments of waking, tantalising her with their evanescence. Then she remembered the excursion to the creek and dismissed them, looking forward at once to a refreshing plunge into the cool depths of Toby’s Hole.
    As she pulled on her bathers and gathered the things she would take to the creek she wondered about the outcome of the incident at the lunch table. The prospect of watching Robert Crofts fight in the tournament marquee in Springtown tomorrow evening was giving a surprising lift to her day; it was something out of the ordinary to look forward to. She was taken a little off-guard, and felt pleasurably guilty at the same time, to discover the keen element of voyeurism in her reaction. But, aside from this, she was intrigued by the prospect of seeing the stockman in a situation where he would be forced to abandon his solitariness and reveal himself.
    She laughed as she took a final look at herself in the mirror; and as she left her room she felt uplifted by a lively sense of enjoyment, almost of irresponsibility. Changes in her life seemed about to take place. She felt ready for them. It was not a matter of calculation but of feeling, of expectation and inner excitement. It had been with her for some time. Perhaps six months, or even longer. In some ways, she recognised, it had always been with her, down there underneath the everyday feelings, working its way slowly up to the light. Now here it was, suddenly, today, visible to her at last, focused inexplicably on the fight the stockman was to have tomorrow evening at the Springtown carnival. Calm and self-assured, she now carried this feeling of excitement within her like a precious secret.
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    It was with reluctance that Ward Rankin had made the phone call to enter the stockman as well as Gil Sturgiss in the boxing tournament. He had been obliged to after the lunchtime incident that had intrigued each member of the Rankin family, without striking any of them as particularly crucial. It was only slowly, and with the unreal certainties of hindsight, that this incident came to be viewed by at least one of them as a turning point. Many years afterwards Janet Rankin would look back on this Christmas lunch as establishing the moment which irrevocably bound the stockman to her family. And she would always carry with her the troubling conviction that she had foreseen the significance of it all at the time. Though of course she had not.
    Even the positions of each of them at the lunch table remained clear in her memory. She was sitting opposite her father, his slim, slightly hunched figure sharply silhouetted against the streaming light at the head of the table. The smoke from his cigarette rose in a cloud around him and his expression was hidden in the dark shadows of his face. To her left was Gil Sturgiss and next to him, on her father’s right, Alistair. On her father’s left sat her mother and between her mother and herself was the stockman. Lunch was well over and a fourth round of charades was faltering