A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd

following year, when it did, I think, start him on an unfortunate phase of his life. In the meantime we had been for yet another summer holiday to Tasmania.
    That original restless impulse which made our great-grandparents come to Australia, must have passed on to their descendants, as they could never stay long in one place. When they lived at Waterpark they spent half their time wandering about the Continent, and one sometimes imagines their spiritual home would have been a wagon-lit.
    There is not the same scope for travel in Australia. One may journey a thousand miles from Melbourne, and the food, the architecture, the vegetation and the ‘way of life’ remain roughly the same. Tasmania is slightly different, more ‘English’ with its orchards and green valleys, and its late Georgian houses built by the convicts. When the family were seized by their congenital restlessness, this was where they were most likely to go. I went for at least six summer holidays toTasmania before I was twelve years old, but the most vivid inmy memory is the one we took in the summerfollowing Austin’s death.
    The clan travelled en masse ,as in the previous summer, but this time the composition of the party was a little different. Dominic was with us and Alice had invited two of the Dell boys. She did this as a rather curious tribute to Austin’s memory. They never came in his lifetime when he would have enjoyed their company, and if his ghost was aware of their presence he must have been rather irritated than gratified at the belated invitation. The other addition to the party was Baba, who had not come last time in spite of the spontaneous geniality with which her future in-laws had asked her. She hated people to behave in a disinterested fashion as it obliged her to do the same. If anyone did a kindness from which they received no benefit, either in social advancement or a useful sense of obligation in the recipient, she said they were ‘silly.’
    The end even of her pleasures was not in themselves, but in the extent they would enhance her position in the world. It was ‘smart’ to go to Tasmania, and she imagined that as a Mrs Langton she would have a brilliant social life there, dining at Government House and going to parties on battleships, as the fleet would be in, but the expedition was developing into a kind of school treat. She thought it was not ‘smart’ to have children, or at any rate to be seen with them in public. The Langtons maddened her by their neglect of their social opportunities. When she looked round the table at Beaumanoir, with its fine glass and china, andeighteenth-century silver brought from Waterpark she thought it quite crazy to fill it with more or less impecunious relatives rather than with social leaders from Toorak. She did not understand that the social leaders would not make Alice laugh, at least not in a manner that would be polite. In the same way she could not understand that the family did not go to Hobart in January because it was fashionable, but because it was cooler, and a marvellous place for fishing, sketching, picnics and excursions. She said insolently to Diana:
    â€˜Why doesn’t Mrs Langton get rid of all these hangers-on and enjoy her money herself?’
    â€˜I can’t see that Mama would be any happier living alone in peevish luxury,’ said Diana, with her last two words carelessly annihilating Baba’s whole conception of the good life, and not even aware that she had done so. Even the more muddleheaded of the family sprinkled their chatter with phrases which were gems of concise and vivid expression. Mixed with a good deal of drivel, the quartz which contained the gold, they were not appreciated outside the family, who took them for granted, like children wrecked on a desert island who play daily with the nuggets they find on the shore. In fact it was the intermittent sparkles of their conversation which increased their