Ernie came out, no longer masked, sat near him on a bench and lit a cigarette. A widower. He too looked upwards.
“Winnie, are you there?” He sighed and puffed. “Answer came there bloody none.”
Despicable, pitiful Ernie. Had he ever invoked the stars for Missy? Now he concentrated on the humbler glowing star of the cigarette end, which he held before him at chin level.
“You’ve been a white man to me, Tim, through all this.”
“It’s a pity you didn’t know me, Ernie, before your mob wrote their letters to supply houses.”
Ernie murmured, “I bloody told you. I take no pride in overzealous business like that.”
“Will you write me a reference? Will you break with your friends and say I’m an honest fellow? Now we’re in the land of the living, Ernie?”
Ernie thought awhile. “You say that, Tim. Not all of us really with the living though. Not all.”
Albert, Lucy, Missy, Primrose, Winnie. The holy, diverse ever-present departed.
“Ernie, I see the signs of mending in you. You’ve put on your bright medals again, haven’t you. You’ll want to be a father of our city. West, Central, East.”
“Tim. It’s all hollowness …”
“The injustice that’s been done me and others. Is that hollow, Ernie?”
“Come to me, Tim, then, when I go back to the dreary bloody desk, the dreary bloody office. I’ll see what I can do for you. You’ve been a white man …”
But Tim could taste stale reality on his tongue. The same nonsense, saving and beginning. And then the lies, the contentions, the same ruinous enthusiasms. In the earth, solely Kitty, the thought of Kitty, did not weary him. Apart from that, a hemispheric weariness from here down the huge coast and over limitless water and ice to the South Pole. Weariness across the snow there like a stale yellow light.
Turning a shoulder, Ernie withdrew himself. He was looking at the piercing stars again.
Thirteen
SULLEN AFTERNOON for Tim’s and Ernie’s release. Bulky, plum-blue clouds conspired above the mountains and casually threatened the valley. They would bring a great gush of air behind them, a great coolness. At such an hour as this Lazarus had emerged. Under such biblical clouds.
Carrying their portmanteaus. They had still not exchanged names with the ambulance men. But having thanked them earnestly, Tim and Ernie walked around the side of the building like two workmates going off a shift. At the end of their imprisonment, short in time but intense in content, they moved edgily, unused to the outer world.
Rounding the side of the verandah where he had unloaded poor Albert, Tim saw first someone who meant least. M. M. Chance, standing by his sulky under the big Morton Bay fig at the front of the hospital. Waiting for his bereaved friend. Ernie walked to him like a soldier surrendering, Chance reaching a hand out, drawing Ernie back to the community’s daily offices. Over his shoulder, Ernie looked across at Tim, as if what terrified him most was that Chance would lift him into the vehicle and cart him away.
“You’re welcome to stay with Mrs. Chance and me until you’re steady again,” said Mr. Chance.
“Mrs. Chance has been reassured by Dr. Erson about the plague?” asked Ernie.
“She’s an educated woman,” said M. M. “She knows you don’t get the plague from people looking at you.”
Kitty and the children were beyond the gates standing by the gold and blue T. Shea—General Store dray. Pee Dee, the old fool, his bag on, deigning to wait, not to back the cart through the hospital fence. And familiar horses of a different order waited a little further down the hill—Bandy’s grey and his beautiful roan, and by their heads, side by side with reins in their hands, stood Bandy and Mamie. Mamie had ridden up here on the roan. It had a woman’s saddle on it. Tim was tickled somehow by the idea of his sister-in-law the horsewoman. What a goer, that Mamie!
By the dray, Kitty waited, grinning a big, criminal grin. He gave himself up to the first huge embrace, the children taking a part at the edges. Kitty’s mouth full of affection and warm spittle, and her face moist.
“I knew that scapular would see you out, Tim,” she wetly cried, and delight and hope and terror went through him and brought out his tears …
“Are we broke yet?” he asked her.
“It’s a mixed bag. I’ll certainly be telling you.”
“I am a victim of injustice,” Tim confided to her.
“But the fleas didn’t bite you, so let it go at that.”
He did let it go at that, let his limbs hang, and her arms encircled him at the elbows. When strength returned he lifted Annie, whose face was full of a terrible confidence in his immortality. Johnny kept a distance.
Meanwhile Bandy and Mamie closed in together. Their unison seemed strange. They smiled foolishly.
“Give your congratulations to the engaged couple,” Kitty told him.
“Is this so?” Tim asked. He felt a surge of outrage but a kind of innocence in Bandy’s face chastened Tim when it came to expressing outrage.
“Bandy is accepting instruction as a Catholic,” said Mamie blithely.
“Well,” said Tim. “Well. I’d heard that earlier on.”
“Wish them every happiness, you miserable old bugger,” said Kitty. “The happiness we have.”
“Oh, I do, of course I do,” said Tim. “You don’t come out of the plague hospital for the purpose of cursing people.”
“I should hope bloody not.” Kitty was laughing. She who had always been at home to Bandy.
“I will be a very obedient husband,” Bandy told him. “I will give up the reckless expense of racehorses.”
“Don’t make rash promises,” said Tim. “Just because you’re getting married.”
Though he’d meant it in strict terms, everyone seemed to find it hilarious.
“God you’re such an individual, Tim,” said Kitty.
“I’d like some black tea with rum in it and a large lump of fruit cake. Does our present condition permit such luxuries?”
“Buckets of tea. Pounds of cake!”
Both Kenna sisters uttered their totally individual laugh.
“Wild horses!” cried Tim though. For a sulky was thundering up the hill out of West. He could see it was driven along by his friend the Offhand, and seated in it by his side, holding her hat, was the little wisp of widow with whom rumour associated him. The rumour publicly declared today in this stormy light.
Offhand, pink-faced from the rush, drew the sulky up and tied the reins to a gum tree on the far side of the road. Rough old road which led to the upriver demesne of Old Burke, to Comara, and in the end, by breakneck escarpments to Armidale. As the Offhand came running across the road, Kitty and Mamie and the children stood back, so clearly was Tim in the Offhand’s sights. He drew Tim aside without apology.
“There is nothing to say,” Tim warned him. “No bloody tales of the plague ward. Except there isn’t any Boer War in there. And let me tell you, the plague keeps different bloody lists than at Templars’ bloody Hall.”
Panting Offhand held his hands up. “You are entitled to your chagrin. But I’m talking to you for the last time, Tim. My fiancée Mrs. Flitch has agreed to marry me, as women will—it’s typically when my affairs are at their worst. I have no job, Tim. I have been dismissed by the management board of the Macleay Chronicle. Australis, you see. I wrote those letters off to the Argus for a joke. Regretted them straight after the first one, when people began to attribute them to you. I laid low though, thinking, damage is done! Might as well finish with my rodomontade, might as well cover the canon of my concerns. Then I kept postponing the confession, Tim. Hit me if you want.”
It’s always your friends who do you the worst harm. Tim would need to pretend to be furious, when what he felt was weariness. “I don’t bloody well want to hit you. A hit isn’t enough.”
“Tim, Tim,” murmured the Offhand and looked very ill. “Let’s at least part friends. The fact is I am emigrating to America. I have a sist
er there. San Francisco and Oakland are excellent newspaper towns, I am told. If mistakes made in the rest of the world are unknown in Australia—just ask half the doctors on this coastline if that’s not true, half the older men married to younger women too—the converse is that mistakes made in Australia are unknown in the wider world! I go with a reference as to my editorial competence, and with little else. The editorial board are very happy to foist me onto the Americans. They say I’m too puckish for the bush.”
Tim whistled to himself.
“Puckish? They say you were puckish. I wish they’d say that about me, I wish they wrote my crimes so bloody low. They say I’m so despicable that they need to write to the supply houses and cancel my credit! You’re sent off with a reference. I’m on my own.”
“Oh, I’ve written a full confession which shall appear, and an exhortation to sanity. Last Tuesday, Tim, the news came that Ladysmith had been relieved. The British column had at last broken through to rescue the gritty garrison, et cetera, et cetera. Now you would have thought that the gentlemen of the Patriotic Fund would have danced in the streets of Central. But no such thing. An ordinary day of business. No giddiness, no great municipal gasps of relief! They still smoke their pipes and clang their cash boxes and milk their bloody cows! I’ve written this in my last piece. It is already composited. Might do some good.”
“I hope to Christ you didn’t mention me!”
“Ah, you think I have a poison touch, don’t you, Tim. No, though I do mention certain businesses in the Macleay district which have been singled out, and so forth. But Tim, let me say, for any harm I’ve done you, please accept this.”
He took an envelope from his vest pocket and pushed it into Tim’s hands. “There’s fifteen pounds in there. It’ll pay for some things.”
“No,” Tim said. “I can’t take this.”
But the Offhand had skipped backwards, waving his hands. Already making for his sulky and Mrs. Flitch. “Won’t take it back, Tim,” he called.
He untethered and jumped aboard his vehicle so fast that for Tim to chase him to argue would have been out of kilter with this afternoon, this plain plague resurrection on which the first grand drops of rain were beginning to fall.
Tim went to Kitty flapping his arms like a helpless bird.
“Fifteen quid,” he told her.
“All contributions welcome,” she said, grinning, reaching up and drawing him down towards her breasts, her paunch. Their child readying itself in secrecy. He noticed Johnny staring now, an unlikely, still gaze.
“He has not been himself,” said Kitty.
In the world again, he did not like the counter so much, did not like to stand there at the mercy of whatever person entered. It had in any case proved an unwise procedure in the past. Women to whom he made deliveries now were of course possessed by a fear that he had not been long enough in quarantine. They would call out from deep in the house, “Just wait, Mr. Shea. Wait in the yard. I shall leave the money on the back step, and then you can come up and collect it.” Was Ernie finding the same, and in his grief did he care? Did people look fearfully at pages he had audited and passed his finger down.
In the residence dining room one mid-afternoon, a conference was called around the table. Kitty sat close to him. He noticed how sure she was that the omens had lifted from him, how exultant to have him back, certified by Erson. He and Kitty sat together at the top of the table. At the side of the table Bandy and Mamie sat, Mamie with a languid hand on her fiancé’s forearm.
“Bandy’s been reading Irish history now,” said Mamie, and Bandy—not wanting to be showy with his knowledge—murmured, “The plantations of Ireland. Cromwell crying, ‘To Connaught or to Hell!’ ”
He was such a willing enthusiast for his new fidelity, his new systems of loves.
“We need to circumvent the hatred they have always had for us,” said Bandy like a Fenian. “Your wife and I, Tim, have devised an arrangement.”
“From here on, the accounts at the supply houses will be in Bandy’s name,” Kitty explained. “He’ll receive the bills and underwrite them, though we’ll pay them. I think it’s generous in a big way and that he’s a total white man.”
“Not in exact terms,” said Tim, and everyone laughed.
Kitty said, “See, we have that safety net. Bandy’s our long stop.”
Bandy beamed diagonally across the table at Tim. The services he had been threatening to offer Tim from the start, the system of generosity, was now in place, and Tim and Kitty such poor beggars they couldn’t refuse it all. And gratitude was the only right emotion. But Tim felt resentment. Even of Mamie, so recently landed and now with an edge on her sister.
“Ernie Malcolm promised me a reference,” he said, and the three of them, the two sisters and Bandy, looked at each other and pursed their lips at his gullibility.
“We are a family now,” said Kitty. “A wonderful thing to have the strength of it behind a person.”
She caressed Tim’s shoulder, an indulgent caress. As if she believed his quarantine, the daily fear of plague which had occupied him in the old barracks, had left him incapable for the time being.
Bandy and Mamie rode together to Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Father Bruggy in his golden cope, raising up the species of bread which masked the substance of Christ. In a gold monstrance for the adoration of the engaged couple.
Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the sparing of Tim and the discovery of each other. Plus thanks for the conversion of the infidel. Mamie’s charm had done what the Crusaders couldn’t.
At these times, the children asleep, Kitty and Tim were left alone at the big sandsoaped table, the broad surface of their marriage.
“You don’t say much,” said Kitty. “What do you think of Bandy? As regards Mamie, is what I mean.”
“I think it could be recklessness. To have a Muslim father-in-law. And what about poor bloody Joe?”
“Oh, someone will get sick of seeing Joe stand around calf-eyed and marry him just for the chance of educating him. That’s how it happened with you.”
“A just point,” Tim said. He stood up to pour Kitty more tea. Tay, she called it, like a peasant. But that hadn’t stopped her understanding the way things went in New South Wales.
She asked, “What would you think if I told you Bandy’s already put up cash? That I’d borrowed the whole of our debt from Bandy? The little feller’s rolling in it, you know. A wealthy young man, not a drinker. No women to spend money on. No children. And seems to think we are his relatives.”
“I’d say I don’t want to depend on him.” In fact he felt the beginning of tears. Have I travelled so far to be someone’s tenant all over again?
Kitty shrugged, reached for his wrist, and put her head on its side. “It’s happened, I’m afraid. We signed an agreement letter. Something had to be arranged, darling. Something had to be managed! Be angry if you have to be.”
But he couldn’t manage anger. Anger was for those lucky buggers who had some power left. “Dear God! Was this before or after Mamie agreed to marry the little individual?”
“Fair play, Timmy! Do you think I’d sell my own sister? Only the bloody nobility do that sort of thing. No. She always thought he was Christmas. I mean, Tim, can you see Mamie lying still for being an item of sale?”
“I thought she was just pretending to like the hawker, see. Just to get at Joe.”
Kitty shook her head with such energy. “From the first time he came into the plague camp, down the river selling things. From that time, she thought he was Christmas.”
“So how much did you borrow, Kitty?”
“It was a full two hundred pounds.”
Again, it was too large a sum to remonstrate over. All he did was drink his tea with its rum lacing. He’d need a lot more rum. “Bloody mad,” he then said sombrely. Yet he felt both exhilarated too, as well as tethered. “We are bound to the little fellow for eternity.” He uttered it like a matter of fact. “But two hundred. Why did y
ou need so much, for God’s sake?”
“Because. I have bought Elliott’s old store in East.”
He stood up without knowing it. East! There was joy in that idea. The river between him and his Central foolishness. The idea of the river sliced through him now, dividing him, putting all that was foul on the further bank.
“Jesus, is this really true?”
“We’ll primp the place up. Great deal more space than here. When the bridge opens … well, we’ll be on the pig’s back!”
All too much, too fast! In a rush, the tide ran out and left him stranded.
“Did you think I’d be dead?” he asked. “And you’d never have to account to me?”
She wouldn’t answer and her cheeks reddened, bringing forth a freckle or two. She rose from the table, waddled inside, came back with a large dossier of documents and slung them down in front of him. “I kept this for you, Tim. Read this and don’t insult me.”
He fingered the dossier. A marvel how much had been done in a period of quarantine. Her arts of business let free by his absence. There wasn’t any question about that.
“Though you’d be much better to wait till morning before addressing the details,” she advised him.
Tim wanted to know. He felt indeed too tired, even a little sore-headed for business.
“How much interest is the little Punjabi asking?”
“There is no interest. He says it is a crime to charge interest to members of his family. He wants repayment and a tenth part in the business, that’s all.”
In East, though, they would draw on the populations of Dock Flat and Pola Creek as well as on flasher residences on Rudder’s Hill. It was an idea! Again the waters commenced to run and he was excited in spite of himself.
Before they went to bed, he visited his sleeping son and daughter. Annie’s cheek, and the scar line on Johnny’s head. Johnny still slept like someone concentrating for a dive. He’d been chastened, said Kitty, and spoke in his sleep. Each day perhaps half his soul went down the cliff with Lucy’s.
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