【荆棘鸟】第五章 08

helping¹ her pick her fastidious, cross-patch way through the Gilly mud in imported guipure lace shoes, smiling and chatting with the people she greeted royally, standing² by her side as she presented the emerald bracelet³ to the winner of the principal race, the Gillanbone Trophy⁴. Why they had to spend all the prize money on a woman's trinket instead of handing over a gold-plated cup and a nice bundle of cash was beyond him, for he did not understand the keenly amateur nature of the race meeting, the inference that the people who entered horses didn't need vulgar money, instead could carelessly toss the winnings to the little woman. Horry Hopeton, whose bay gelding King Edward had won the emerald bracelet, already possessed⁵ a ruby⁶, a diamond and a sapphire⁷ bracelet from other years; he had a wife and five daughters and said he couldn't stop until he had won six bracelets⁸.

 

Paddy's starched⁹ shirt and celluloid collar chafed¹⁰, the blue suit was too hot, and the exotic Sydney seafood¹¹ they had served with champagne¹² at luncheon¹³ had not agreed with his mutton-inured digestion¹⁴. And he had felt a fool, thought he looked a fool. Best though it was, his suit smacked¹⁵ of cheap tailoring and bucolic¹⁶ unfashionableness. They were not his kind of people, the bluff¹⁷ tweedy graziers, the lofty matrons, the toothy, horsy young women, the cream of what the Bulletin called "the squattocracy." For they were doing their best to forget the days in the last century when they had squatted¹⁸ on the land and taken vast tracts¹⁹ of it for their own, had it tacitly acknowledged as their own with federation²⁰ and the arrival of home rule. They had become the most envied group of people on the continent, ran their own political party, sent their children to exclusive Sydney schools, hobnobbed with the visiting Prince of Wales. He, plain Paddy Cleary, was a workingman. He had absolutely nothing in common with these colonial aristocrats²¹, who reminded him of his wife's family too much for comfort. So when he came into the presbytery lounge to find Frank, Meggie and Father Ralph relaxed around the fire and looking as if they had spent a wonderful, carefree day, it irritated him. He had missed Fee's genteel support unbearably²² and he still disliked his sister as much as he had back in his early childhood in Ireland. Then he noticed the sticking plaster over Frank's eye, the swollen²³ face; it was a heaven-sent excuse. "And how do you think you're going to face your mother looking like that?" he yelled. "Not a day out of my sight and you're back at it again, picking fights with anyone who looks at you sideways!"