Free A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd Page B

marriage between first cousins, and evidently thought the Langtons were already mad enough.
    Dominic was to be sent to an agricultural college called Horton in New South Wales, but he was barely sixteen and was thought rather young to go just yet. Also it was the middle of the term, so they sent him first for six months to Rathain. This was Uncle George’s farm, twenty miles further into Gippsland than Westhill. It was called after Dolly Potts’s home in Ireland, which must have been extremely irritating to Baba. Dominic was to live there, to work on the farm, and to discover if he had any taste for an agricultural life. He had not, of course. He had the artistic temperament without much creative ability, a disastrous combination, though occasionally he made sombre drawings. To send him to George and Baba was one of those inexplicable idiocies which occurs too frequently in the history of our family, in fact in the history of most families which one knows at all intimately.
    He could have tested his agricultural capacity justas well at Westhill, where the land was farmed in a no more dilletante fashion than at Rathain, but if Dominic had stayed at Westhill it would have been too like the school holidays, and he would have spent his time riding Tamburlaine and shooting rabbits. It sounded better to say to inquisitive and censorious relatives: ‘He’s learning farming under George.’
    It is odd that Baba allowed him to come, but she was inclined to be avaricious, and Steven paid for Dominic’s keep and something over. She may even have liked the prospect of licking him into shape. On the day of the accident on Mount Wellington she had established her ascendancy over George. He was bitterly ashamed of his recklessness which had endangered the children, and she took advantage of this. Her practice, if anyone threw down his defences, was immediately to run in and kick him in the stomach. He also, with that detachment which was a family characteristic, may have thought that he had been unfair to Baba to marry her when he was in love with someone else, and brutal to let her know, but most of all he may have been afraid to provoke another of those appalling outbursts of vulgarity, which frightened him more than the cannon’s mouth. Also he did not know that Baba had planned to acquire him as cold-bloodedly as gangsters set out to break into a bank.
    George was not well off before Alice died, but Baba was very houseproud. She believed that hersocial position was enhanced by the spotless cleanliness of the linoleum which covered the floors of her little wooden house. Before George’s marriage the interior of this house was quite pleasant, rather like his undergraduate’s rooms at Cambridge from which he had brought the furniture. But Baba removed all this, saying it was not smart, and she replaced it by some shoddy ‘new art’ stuff, so that the rooms looked as if they were arranged behind the plate glass windows of a bad furniture shop. She had two farm girls, whom she dolled up in starched linen caps and aprons, which ill became their bold-eyed, rollicking rustic faces, and of whom she spoke frequently as ‘my maids.’ Baba’s maids were already a joke in the family when Dominic went to Rathain. They were a year or two older than he was. Their combined wages were seventeen shillings and sixpence a week.
    When Dominic arrived George and Baba were in a state of almost ceaseless hostility, suppressed on his part, but on hers as open as it could be towards someone who did not retaliate. It may have been because of this that George arranged for Dominic to come, hoping that the presence of a third party, even of a boy of sixteen, would ease the situation. If so it was very simple of him to imagine that Dominic could ever ease any situation, between any people, anywhere.
    The spirit of the missionary and that of the knight-errant are not dissimilar. Dominic always wanted to right the