A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “Remember you? You’ve never met them.”

  “Then you can bloody introduce me by photograph. The one with the straggly moustache. The masher one.”

  “Taken to impress them by the village-load back home. Look at our Tim doing so well in the new world!”

  “That’s the very one.”

  He had the strangest, unsettling yet admiring feeling that she had become so easily separate from him and the children. A woman sailing on her own behalf. There were a few caresses which afterwards he barely remembered. Exiled in his own town, he went ashore with Ellen and the children. Burrawong creaked and growled out of Central wharf, and there on the dark river, seen by the lanterns on the mast, stood Kitty with her elbows on the rails! Various of Mr. Howe’s Variety’s local friends were hooting and whistling from the wharf, but the hugeness of the river and the night absorbed them all at a gradual but relentless rate. Performers and wives alike. The lantern on the mast was very soon all that could be seen.

  “Oh, well,” Mr. Arnold said beside him on the wharf. He sounded like a man delivered from a social duty, a civil event or even a funeral, who could now go and take a drink in peace.

  “They’ll be fine, they’ll be fine,” murmured Tim like a prayer.

  “It’s very crowded,” said Arnold in parting. “Must be seven dozen passengers at least. The bloody North Coast Steamship Company has a cheek!”

  And then, the complaint hanging, he was gone.

  How he felt, Tim understood, was an echo of how his parents had felt seeing them all go. A jealousy of the size of the earth and the enormity of the night. The idea that the sea holds, caresses, owns the travellers intimately.

  During the walk home, Annie and he on more or less the same lines as each other remained wisely suspicious of events. Ellen Burke and Johnny had the holiday fevers. The little bugger went all the way down Smith Street walking on his hands. Howe’s Variety had had a dangerous influence on him.

  At home, and just to deepen his mood, Tim went into the store while Ellen Burke washed the children and readied them for their motherless night. He sorted through the pile of overdues which Kitty had left for him to deal with. Amongst them was a politely wrathful letter from Truscott and Lowe acknowledging receipt of part payment of their account but pointing out the remainder was overdue, and that he should be prompt to avoid legal action.

  These clients of his owed him the amounts Truscott and Lowe were dunning him for. Holy God, the Malcolms with nearly four months unpaid. Ernie would want to give you an award for bravery rather than pay you for sardines! Others. Grant the pharmacist, more than two months. Things not good in that household. Like young Baylor a pleasant man, but said to be another opium-eater—or drinker rather. Draughts of laudanum for some pain he didn’t state.

  Well, these were two, Malcolm and Grant, to give a nudge to.

  Midnight. Making reasonable time on a calm night, Kitty should now be safely over the bar, prone in her bunk, blinking at the dark.

  That night, to reduce the world to size, he drank some of the brandy he had last broached with Constable Hanney the day Missy had been presented. He lay down with a sugary, thick head. Deep in the night he saw Burrawong in a sunlit sea which reason said it could not yet have reached. He yearned to be aboard the vessel, so happy did her situation seem to be with the ocean. For a better view he sat on the side of his bed.

  Not unreasonably the door opened and his father, Jeremiah Shea of Glenlara via Newmarket, Duhallow, brought the girl Missy into Tim’s bedroom by the hand. His father creaking along in a rare mood of levity.

  “There you are,” he said. “Dear God, what a lord! In your big wifeless bed in New South Wales.”

  He gestured to the girl, who wore a veil as protection from the glare.

  “Man could not have a better fellow pilgrim.” And, as never happened in the years before immigration, his father prattled on. “Miss, here’s my son?” Old Jeremiah said. A social creature now, a rabid introducer all at once.

  Missy lifted her veil the better to inspect Tim. The gaze was level and yet properly restrained. She was the sober person, whereas Old Jeremiah would have fitted in with the half-stewed boys around the keg at the cricket match, or with Howe’s Variety.

  “She knows your face,” said Jeremiah. “We all wonder about the name.”

  What was his name? And he wondered why did she think it important?

  “Bandy Habash,” he told Jeremiah and Missy as a ploy. He kept his real name from them, and turned the heat of their attention towards the hawker.

  She said, “I’ll put the veil back down. I get my blemishes from being watched.”

  Tim said, “I’m sorry.” But he saw that no blemishes marked her face.

  “No,” she assured him. “Not your fault.”

  “I’ve overdone the staring business myself,” his old man shamelessly admitted. “Well, the day goes on …”

  Missy took the hint and turned to leave.

  “You came by ship,” said Tim, staring past his father out into the broad sea and Burrawong set eternally in it.

  “Well,” said Missy, who by her tone was used to being mistrusted. “You can ask them.”

  She turned and vanished around a corner of darkness within which the blinding sea was framed.

  His father remained to say, “How is it? Tell me.”

  “I could be happy,” Tim meant to tell him. But the father did not wait for that answer.

  Ernie Malcolm’s big plum-red brick place in West Kempsey had broad verandahs where, according to the builder’s fancy, Ernie and Mrs. Malcolm could sit on spacious rattan chairs and get the air off the river. Neither of them, of course, were ever seen at leisure out there. As Tim arrived, summer light slanted across the unfrequented boards of the wide porch. But that was not the trade entrance, the entrance to take when begging for money. Tim went to the back of the house to make his delivery. He hoped Ernie had not yet left for his office, for after the angry scene in front of the Good Templars he wished to see Ernie again, to gauge him, to have him accept and acknowledge an honest claim for payment.

  At the same time, somewhere, at the core of the house, in an unimaginable cool place, pale and lovely Mrs. Malcolm waited for the summer to complete its course.

  They had a maid, an old half-caste lady named Primrose, and she was the one who always took the deliveries. Primrose shuffled to the back door when he knocked. He asked her kindly to fetch Mr. or Mrs. Malcolm.

  Old Primrose said Mr. Malcolm was already at the office. (Bloody Ernie so industrious!) She would have to go and see how Missus was.

  She was gone so long that Tim thought—with some relief Kitty wouldn’t have approved of—that today he would not need after all to ask for payment, and put Ernie and his wife to any test. In daylight the urgency of the demand was mitigated … He could well wait a day or so before putting the hard word on anyone. He didn’t want people, especially an admirer of Alfred Lord Tennyson, to call him hungry, to lump him in and say, “They’ve always got their hands out, those fellows.”

  But Mrs. Malcolm did all at once appear in the back area, near the kitchen and the curtained-off space where Primrose slept. Strands of her hair were coming loose from their ribbons, and though he had never imagined such a thing, it was understandable on a day like this, when any sane woman not on extreme personal display would feel entitled to let her hair stray. And yet there was something heightened about her. This was the further stage of the bewilderment she’d shown first at Bert Rochester’s funeral. He had never seen her face exactly like this though. It wasn’t a colour that could be explained by the heat.

  “Tim,” she said, licking her pale lips. “Hello.”

  She did not normally call him Tim. She was in fact as far out of her normal character as his father had been in the dream.

  “Come into the dining room. Come! Come!”

  He obeyed her, entering through the curtain she held aside and standing by her varnished table while she swayed
by the hallway door.

  “Would you like tea?”

  Her head weaved about as if to cast up the possibility of tea.

  “I don’t need any, thank you kindly,” said Tim, since he did not want to turn his shame at finding her like this into a social event.

  “But Primrose,” Mrs. Malcolm called, “Mr. Shea must have at least a glass of water.”

  Primrose appeared, went to the tap which came into the house from the water tanks, and poured Tim a lean tumbler of tank water. She held it up to the light.

  “The wrigglers still in it, Mrs. Malcolm,” she told Mrs. Malcolm, inspecting the larvae which flickered in the water like tiny, luminous eels.

  Mrs. Malcolm laughed greatly, walked up to inspect the glass, then sat at one of the chairs by the kitchen table.

  “A man like Tim won’t mind those. A solid fellow and such a good batsman. You won’t mind them. Will you?”

  He said not at all. He wondered aloud could he have a word. At an inexact nod from Mrs. Malcolm, Primrose disappeared out of the dining room and then through the outer door into the heat-hazed back yard and the cookhouse.

  Tim reached into a pocket in his coat and brought out the Malcolm account.

  “I hope you won’t mind this, Mrs. Malcolm. Your account is nearly four months overdue now. I just wondered if you could take the time to raise the matter with Mr. Malcolm. You see, it’s not me. But the Sydney business houses demand payment within three months at the latest. I’m very happy to extend good credit to you and Mr. Malcolm and I value …”

  Mrs. Malcolm held up his explanations by raising her hand. She said, “ ‘I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: Borrowing only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable …’ ”

  He must have been frowning and she laughed sharply. “Henry IV. We did both Parts I and II at the Brighton Town Hall on successive nights … Rather … rather neglected in the Shakespearian repertoire.”

  “Oh yes. I’ve never actually heard the quotation before. But you always surprise me, Mrs. Malcolm.”

  Never more than now.

  “Don’t worry. I know your clients in the Macleay play on your good nature, Tim. I see it. I have an eye for it. It’s happened to me too. But I am abashed … abashed …”

  She lowered her head and swung it from side to side. This was bad to see. He was certain that this was drink. Though at the cricket she had not taken even a sip of ale.

  “Ernie should be doing this,” she stated. “Hell and damnation, Tim. He’s an accountant.” She started beating the table with the palm of her hand. “He should come to account.”

  She stood up with a jerky suddenness.

  “I shall get you the sum, Tim. What is it again?”

  Ashamed, he read the amount of the bill.

  “At once, at once,” said Mrs. Malcolm.

  But she seemed hit by bewilderment or loss of memory, and so did not move. She made a whimpering, and raised her hand and put her forehead against the back of the palm.

  Tim touched her elbow to get her moving, to bring her back to earth. “Please, don’t go to any trouble or be upset. I should have gone perhaps to Mr. Malcolm’s office.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you don’t know what Ernie’s offices are. I, Mr. Shea, have been the object of them, and know well his offices.” She raised an index finger to her lips and let out a long sustained, theatrical shush. “I believe the petty cash is in the tea caddy. Pound notes with your name on them, so to speak. Housekeeping money. A second, Tim.”

  She disappeared through the kitchen door, and he heard her stop for a while in the corridor, confused again. He could not follow her there though. “Oh well,” he heard her say.

  He disliked anyhow the stillness of kitchens in the heat of summer days, when a woman had gone to count and get money, sometimes sighing as she came back with it. At these moments he felt that smallness threatened his heart. A commercial boredom drenched the air, and he felt he’d lost and betrayed the better part of his vocation in life.

  It had been cleaner and more suitable when he had worked as a haulier. Everyone expected to pay hauliers.

  Mrs. Malcolm tottered back with an antique tea caddy in her hands. She opened it and inspected the bank notes within. Then she selected and took out a five pound note and gave it to Tim.

  “This is more than is owed,” said Tim, appalled.

  Mrs. Malcolm’s head swayed again.

  “No. We’ve put you to the inconvenience. We should now give you in simple decency an advance against our next account.”

  “No, I’ll give you change.” He began to search in the leather bag in which he carried his delivery money. Mrs. Malcolm held out her hand, palm forward. It was pretty dramatic. Isabella telling the grandees to let Columbus have a go with his three little boats. Helen of Troy refusing to go home. Elizabeth the First rebuffing a gesture of affection from the Queen of Scots. Mrs. Malcolm uttered noises of denial too, which sounded like “Chut, chut!”

  “But I didn’t ask for more than is on the bill.”

  “I understand that. But I will be very offended if you try to slip the change to Primrose. That won’t be tolerated, Tim.”

  “Then I’ll give you a receipt,” said Tim.

  She did not object, and he got the receipt book from the pouch he carried and began to write. At the bottom of the receipt, he showed the credit of more than one pound, and underlined the sum. He tore out the page and gave it to Mrs. Malcolm.

  “You will point out that receipt to your husband. A credit, see.”

  “I can’t guarantee he’ll take notice,” she told Tim, an ordinary woman with the ordinary sourness she’d been forced to. “He has had a number of preoccupations.”

  “I’m very grateful,” said Tim, straightening up from his work in the receipt book.

  Mrs. Malcolm put her hand out temporarily, seeking an invisible object.

  “You have three children to feed, Mr. Shea?”

  “I have the third on the way, Mrs. Malcolm. April perhaps.”

  “Ah, what a creation we are! Cattle for instance can’t state, do not know the terms of their pregnancies. They have to be told by the farmer.”

  Tim did not know what to make of that. “I suppose that’s right, Mrs. Malcolm. What a work we are.”

  But with the plain exchange of pleaded-for money done, he didn’t feel like much of a work of anything.

  “We don’t have children, but as Ernie says we have the Masonic Lodge and the Good Templars, and the Macleay District Hospital Board, and the Board of the Cricket Club, and, of course, the Turf Club and the Patriotic Fund and the Royal Humane Society. And we keep accounts at as many stores as we can. Spread the wealth, eh. I suppose that in a way the storekeepers’ children are our children. By an indirect route. So we must be happy, I suppose.”

  Ernie had talked like that at the cricket. It must be an article of faith of the Malcolm household.

  “That’s a fair way of looking at it, Mrs. Malcolm,” said Tim. Now he wanted to escape, to take his embarrassment out to old Pee Dee, his confessor nag to whom he could mutter away as he drove.

  She grabbed his wrist. Frantic suddenness. “I’d be grateful if you would look at it that way.”

  “Of course,” he said. He would make any pledges if she’d let him go.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Malcolm. “That’s guaranteed then.”

  “Could I call Primrose for you, Mrs. Malcolm?”

  She laughed at this. “I can find my way around my own house, thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  But she stood there, did not move further into the house, did not release him to the working day, the hard outside light.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said.

  “Yes, I suppose you’ve done your business, haven’t you, Tim?”

  It sounded as if he were again being cast as a storekeeper in a variety sketch. Meanness, the vice you found in everyone, and everywhere in the hard-up bush.
The copper tedium of coins coloured the soul.

  “Far beyond the price of any grocery bill, there’s the friendship with yourself and Mr. Malcolm.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Very well. Then you might as well go.”

  He thanked her in a normal voice and took his hat and left. Outside, in heat like a blow on the back of the head, he passed the sterile verandahs where the dream of elegant Winnie and devoted Ernie sitting together in childless serenity on hot evenings had soured and gone stale. He passed out the TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE, untethered the cart and got aboard, Pee Dee waving his head from side to side in complaint. Tim spoke in the huge afternoon, into which longed-for thunderclouds had now come massing from the west. “Five pounds, you bugger! Gratefully received.”

  Back to the wifeless store and hearth. Ellen Burke cooked a better bush-style breakfast than Kitty, and sandsoaped the kitchen table afterwards as a matter of course. So he would have been an ungrateful fellow indeed to complain. But the tidiness felt like the tidiness of someone else’s house, and the food like food from a stranger’s kitchen.

  The store felt his, and so he minded it while Ellen exercised his permission to take the children for a walk.

  An Aboriginal man, in a blue shirt and trousers tied with rope, appeared as the afternoon storms began and lightning reduced Belgrave Street to size. He looked around to be sure where he was. His feet had left on the boards the faintest trace of soft yellow dust. He had that damaged look: his eyes at odds with his face and with each other. A bad case. People sold them any old poison to drink.

  “Mr. Shea,” the man said in a sharp-edged accent, half-cockney, half something left from before whites came to the Macleay. “I’d like a pint of methylated for cleaning things. And you got some of that rosehip syrup?”

  They were barred from the pubs, and so they drank methylated spirits sweetened with syrup. That’s why the man had that look, as if his eyes were not part of his body but were floating, without reference to one another.

  Tim said, “Not here, Jack. I don’t sell methylated for those purposes.”

  Every other bugger did, so why should he be so fastidious and not a practical man?