The End of the Golden Weather by Bruce Mason

Author:Bruce Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

INTERVAL,

while my sister rushes to the kitchen to wriggle into last year's pink tutu and grab a frilly basket full of rose petals, which she is to toss about to Mendelssohn's Spring Song: I have played it for her over a hundred times while my mother and she sweated out the steps. Then the play, called By Love Deliver'd and Grand Finale, ten historical tableaux under the title of Living Waxworks for which spaces are left in the programme for the audience to guess. Prize: a threepenny bar of chocolate.

God Save the King.

Nervous inside, as though a whole cage of sparrows twittered and fluttered there, I spend the afternoon with my sister, setting out costumes and properties, rigging up the sliding curtains on the French doors which give on to the verandah where the audience will sit.

As the day expires in eruptions of splendour in the west, my parents emerge from sleep and like wan shades of the dead, pass dazedly through the motions of washing up. The turkey lies there ruined and gaping, its proud facade eroded, a strut of bones, hung with tatters of flesh. We tear these off and press them between pieces of bread and butter; my mother tersely explains: “You'll get no more today.”

At seven, we set up the chairs on the verandah in rows and the guests arrive, Indian files of them, snaking up the path from the beach and I am suddenly appalled at the power each one contains within to wreck the evening by misplaced laughter. Soon they are assembled and seated; the men with jugs of beer to their hands, the women with smaller tumblers of coloured liquids laced with gin, the kids with cordial. My heart thumping, I stand close to the curtain and hear for the first time that anticipatory buzz, at once so promising and so—menacing. They are no longer an assembly of friends I have known since I was born but a hydra-headed monster of unknown temper to be wooed, cajoled, placated, appeased. My brother, uneasily sharing my tenseness in the suspended animation of our quarters backstage, suddenly thrusts his head between the curtains and makes a face. Screams and cheering. I lunge at him in fury, venom in my heart.

I pull on the curtain with trembling hand; it parts in little womanish jerks then closes again—in my flurry, I have pulled the wrong cord. It parts. Cheers. My sister enters, demure and pink-cheeked, a bow in her hair and plays her Schumann with a softly radiant poise I marvel at. I follow, my mouth dry, my eyes wild and unfocussed, rattling through the Paderewski as if I were an unwilling tourist in a foreign country, concerned only to make the hated journey up and down the pages as fast as possible. I get bogged on the last page, skip twenty bars, stop; with a sudden flash of inspiration do four furious glissandi up and down the keyboard with my thumbnail and land with a crash on the tonic chord.

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