One of the most startling mercies of great civic and religious mysteries such as marriage is that they convince those who undergo the rite that for the moment they lie at the centre of nature and of God’s plan. The Anglican Mr Chenniger eventually consented to officiate at the marriage, a fact at which my mother, with her dislike of Methodists for what they had done to my father, later expressed herself by letter to be very gratified. But the Reverend Chenniger proved very dour about too much colour or excessive ritual in his church. He clearly thought the act itself, the ‘Till death do we part’, had sufficient grace and hope about it that the flowers, the silverware, the bunting and incense which Phoebe wanted (having got a taste for such things in Geneva) would contribute no more.
Before the wedding, at my rooms at the Royal Hotel, I was delighted to find that Charlie Batchelor had ridden all the way from Yass for this event, and had brought with him Miss Dines, the Australian-born young woman whose hand he had sought, and her Scottish mother. Mr Barley was also present with apologies that his rudder had not accompanied him from Sydney. And then on the verandah, in a dove-grey swan-tailed coat of somewhat better cut than the suit I had purchased two days before from a limited range in Mr Sutler’s, the Braidwood tailor, was my friend the Land Commissioner Peske. All these friends had been notified and summoned by energetic Phoebe.
‘I thought I might as well come,’ Peske told me, ‘and make a complete enemy out of Mr Finlay. Surely though those Finlays are coming to this?’
I told him I believed not, that there had been no answer to the letter I had been careful to send them.
‘Awfully difficult, my friend,’ he told me, ‘without the mama and pa, even though Finlay is such a thorough old brute.’
He laughed in a way I did not entirely enjoy. Fortunately we were joined by Barley and by Charlie Batchelor, and the three of them sat with me on the hotel verandah, smoking cheroots. Their job, they said, was to keep me calm. It had been a summer of low rain and that was a topic of talk, since rain was in all senses the fountainhead.
Peske said, ‘About your girl’s papa, I believe he has had a hard time.’
I had not heard anything of this myself.
‘Has the same problem I have,’ said Barley. ‘Got involved in wool speculation in Sydney, thinking he could be amply recompensed from London. But London merchants have ganged up on us – had to happen! – and he bought at high price, sold at 7 pence ha’penny.’
I had heard, of course, something of the decline in London prices. The Sydney Herald in the parlour of the Royal made frequent comment on it. ‘You are not in trouble yourself, I hope,’ I told Barley.
‘I have a good banker,’ murmured Barley, unembittered by the shifts of markets. ‘But I have a great plan. I had let contracts for the building near Semi-Circular Quay of two large storage warehouses. I shall, if you like, hoard wool, and release it to London auction houses when it suits me and at my price.’
Charlie applauded this. And even in the blur of fear, the watchfulness for omens, the strange weakness induced by desire of the beloved, all of which I suspected was the standard condition of bridegrooms, it was a delight to see Barley’s eyes glitter. ‘I hope I am what you’d call a New South Wales patriot,’ he murmured to me. A little exuberant from brandy, he cast his hands up and said through lips clamped on a cheroot, ‘But we should try to call tune, not have tune called for us.’
At the marriage, these men occupied my side of the church, small as a Van Diemen’s Land chapel but, in a world of slab timber, built of red brick to convey its permanence. And on lovely, be-satined Phoebe’s side of the congregation were her friends Cynthia and Robert Parslow and their friends, who included the police magistrate. The absence of her parents seemed to mean little to Phoebe, but Peske’s barb was still in me and I wondered if her parent-less condition at the altar would be one of those shadows bound to grow with time and distance.
Afterwards in the dining room of the Royal Hotel, in the exultation of my new condition of marriage, in front of a feast I knew I could well afford and seated by my miraculously determined wife in her dress of white satin, I felt delighted to throw my arm round Peske. He was the only one to straddle in friendship all parties to this particular act of matrimony, since he happened to be a friend of the Parslows too. I felt uppermost a dazed delight that Phoebe and I now possessed the extraordinary authority of sitting together to eternity without asking anyone’s authority or pardon.
It was ten o’clock at night, but there was still pudding to be served, when Peske and I wandered, cigars a’mouth, into the hallway to find an outhouse, or what is more pleasant to men in our condition, the edge of an expansive paddock where, shoulder to shoulder and reflecting tipsily on the splendour of the night, we could ease ourselves. We did not get that far, however. In the corridor, at the table where the maid normally sat arranging accommodations for guests, a woman stood forlornly. Peske performed his version of a gallant British officer, in so far as he had learned it in the militia in Van Diemen’s Land, and cried, ‘Madame, could we find you a seat?’
The woman raised her face. It was Mrs Finlay, in a handsome brown riding dress, its hem smeared with wet clay from the harsh road she had travelled, and holding an oilskin coat in one hand. I rushed to her, full of concern to make her welcome. Behind me Peske said, ‘Oh, I see. Forgive me. A fellow should now vanish.’
Mrs Finlay’s head quivered involuntarily. ‘I had meant to be here to speak to you before your marriage. But I wasted too much time and was too influenced by my husband. Then, when I did decide to come, a wheel came off the trap as we crossed over the Gourock Range, and now of course it is eternally too late, Mr Bettany.’ I felt no great threat from her words, and as she shook her head, she seemed weary and philosophic rather than absorbed by either active anger or dread.
‘Come in,’ I pleaded, gesturing towards the door through which we could hear the noise of our guests laughing and a Braidwood ticket-of-leave man playing the fiddle. ‘There is still plenty of food.’
I was thinking that a brandy would do this stranger, who happened by sacramental mystery to be my mother-in-law, even more good than food.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come here for this ill-advised festival, Mr Bettany. This …’ she gestured towards the door I had pointed out earlier, ‘is the product of both foolishness and unworldliness on the part of many, including you, Mr Bettany. My husband, too, made his contribution.’ It was the second time she had said something disapproving of Mr Finlay, and I found that astonishing in a woman who had been tight-lipped on her husband in the past. ‘I can tell you I am here in defiance of him, and this is the first time in twenty years that I can say that. This is the character of your proceedings. In making your heedless marriage, you may well have destroyed my own.’
I made the best defence I could. ‘Isn’t all marriage heedless by nature? Can it ever decently be like the ordering of provisions?’
Naturally she showed a weary contempt for these trite arguments. ‘There is a parlour in there,’ she said, pointing to a small room off the corridor. ‘I’ll wait for you there.’
‘But let me bring you something to eat and drink.’
She told me she would order her own refreshments. ‘Don’t tell Phoebe I am here,’ she said. ‘I am not equipped to face her yet.’
‘Your own daughter, Mrs Finlay.’
‘Yes, but she has scorn for me as yet.’
Leaving her, and abandoning Peske to his solitary relief in the outer dark of the stableyard, I returned to the banquet room, where I kissed a dew of sweat on my wife’s forehead and smiled and made much of her. While she was talking to three young married women at one end of the table, I slipped away to meet her mother.
Mrs Finlay was seated waiting for me, her face still abnormally pale in the lamplight, and her clothes unchanged, but opened at the neck. She had a teacup by her. A sweet odour emanated from it, and there may have been some rum in there too.
‘Your daughter
would be so pleased to see you here, Mrs Finlay,’ I began.
‘I fear I might see her soon enough in any case, Mr Bettany. You are the beneficiary, I hate to tell you, of a persistent novel-reading by my daughter. In a novel, a marriage is not a marriage and love is not love unless it is preceded by prohibitions from fathers, and the threat of disinheritance. Even the mother of the tale, though sometimes depicted as understanding, is meant to be a disappointed crone in whom no blood flows, and a witch on the matter of her daughter’s desires. In such books, marriage is always of this nature, a dangerous compact worth dying for in the teeth of an angry world and angrier parents.’
I could not help but feel a little pulse of anger. ‘It seems to me your husband may have read some of those books too. He was very ready to see me as the man of bad family who wants to corner a fortune.’
She shook her head and turned her face away into the dark. ‘It is his politics, not novels, which produced such beliefs. Also, may I say, a certain wisdom?’
‘But not in my case,’ I told her tightly, well settled in my anger now that it had begun to flow. ‘He tried to have me pitched off my country. And my country is the limits of what I desire.’
‘Your country and my daughter,’ she murmured. ‘The point is that novels are all she knows about marriage. She knows nothing of other matters, of what a man is likely to demand of a wife.’
My anger died and I began blushing. Yet I remembered Phoebe at the end of the table speaking to the other wives. Surely, amongst themselves, some knowledge was passed.
Mrs Finlay continued. ‘You see, she believes she has done everything fiction states to be material to a marriage. She has defied her parents, been adequately disinherited, and undertaken bold strategies to make her intentions known to the beloved! She has filled the role of the heroine. This to her is marriage fully defined. She is, after all, barely more than eighteen. I fear she will be routed by, appalled by that what men and women would consider normal. She will flee home to us, which will not be the best thing for her.’
I shook my head. There was something oppressive here, the concept that a young woman could use me – as Mrs Finlay was saying – as a mere device to mock her parents, or to follow the right sort of literary precedent. ‘I don’t wish …’ I began.
But Mrs Finlay interrupted me wearily. ‘Ah, I think you will find you would be unique if you did not wish, and if you lacked the normal unruly nature of your kind – by which I mean, mankind. I can see you frowning.’
‘Well, of course I am,’ I admitted. ‘That doesn’t mean …’ Again it was impossible to finish. I found it something of a wonder that a girl, my girl, who had grown up in the County of Argyle in New South Wales, a distant and turbulent province with a repute for ungovernable passions of the flesh, both natural and perverse, could yet retain an angelic northern European innocence! It was wonderful and somehow desolating at the same time.
I saw Mrs Finlay assessing me. She was a lovely woman reduced by a kind of wistful fear. ‘If I appear now I shall destroy my daughter’s fiction. But you may tell her that I love her and will see her at a future time. In the meantime I am willing to depend on you for kindness. So let me go to a room, and I shall have vanished by the time you and she appear in the morning. You should go back to the banquet now.’
I assured her I would not harm Phoebe in any way.
She smiled generously. ‘Marriage itself is often the harm. But thank you.’ She reached a hand and took hold of my sleeve. ‘You are not a bad young fellow. I wish you no ill.’
I returned to the feast in a somewhat less hilarious state than I had left it.
Phoebe and I were at last shown to the nuptial room by our friends, and, as Peske said, ‘left to our delights’. When the door closed and our retinue could be heard withdrawing to their own rooms or returning to the dining room, Phoebe turned with lustrous eyes and kissed me at length. This, I thought on her mother’s authority, was – however delightful – from books. It was the point at which novels ended.
‘We should prepare,’ she told me.
‘Yes, you must be ready for a long rest, after such a day.’
‘Such a day?’ she asked, raising perfect eyebrows, as if I had amused her by quaintness. ‘Jonathan, do you wish to wash now, and undress?’
‘No. You prepare, my darling. I shall sit and read a while.’
‘Very well. But I shall need help in lifting off my wedding dress.’
Phoebe stepped out of her satin wedding slippers and I took the weight of the hoop of the dress as Phoebe raised it off her body. She, in bodice and drawers, and I in my wedding suit lowered it to the ground, where it stood by its own stiffness.
‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘How you must have suffered in that.’
‘I suffered but I gloried,’ she told me.
A screen with embroidered swans had been erected and a servant had placed soap, a water basin and towels in its lee. Phoebe went behind this screen, and I sat, still fully dressed, and read a Goulburn Herald report I had already read once yesterday on the civic amenities and industries of Brussels, in the new kingdom of Belgium. The very remoteness of the subject matter was a delightful comfort to me in my exhausted and over-instructed condition, as behind the screen Phoebe washed and sang to herself in French. The young flexibility of her voice touched me, so that I was moved to a frank but hopeless desire.
I remained seated, and Phoebe emerged from the screen in milk-white feet and a long white muslin gown, very simple, very charming. Still singing absently to herself, she knelt a second by the near side of the bed, said in silence what seemed like perfunctory and routine prayers, and got beneath the sheets. I dropped my paper, crookedly pulled my chair across to her, took her hand and kissed it. ‘It has been a very hard long day for you, dearest Phoebe,’ I said.
She lifted my hand and kissed it, in deliberate mimicry. ‘And for you.’
‘You should sleep now.’ I closed my own eyes and yawned a little as if she were a child in need of a demonstration. But Phoebe pulled my head down suddenly and to my delight and confusion gave me a long, thorough, knowing kiss. I was bewildered, since the mother had told me such a kiss was not within the child’s giving. ‘Eros and Morpheus,’ she said. ‘Love and sleep. Do they go hand-in-hand? Not according to what I’ve heard, Jonathan.’
There was another kiss, to which I responded thoroughly, and soon sleep was abandoned. It transpired, as I discovered in later wondering and delighted conversations with my wife, that not only had Phoebe read innocent ‘romances of sighs’ favoured by the English, but had acquired as well a full map of what might be called love in the flesh from certain white-covered French novels which the girls of the Geneva academie passed amongst themselves. On top of that, many of the French and Spanish maidens who attended the academie were willing to speak matter-of-factly of the joys of marriage awaiting them, of which they had had a full and frank account from older sisters, cousins and even from younger aunts, and had also speculated on the question of taking young lovers should they be required to marry older men. Lastly, it seemed young men of the town would on spring nights climb the walls of the academie after the lights had gone out and call to the young women in their rooms, sometimes with a particular piquancy of suggestion which was itself an introduction to the mysteries of Eros. Some of the bravest girls managed midnight meetings with young men in a summerhouse in the gardens, and though these ended with honour intact and virginity retained, the adventurous girls who returned from these assignations related to their sisters every detail of the boys’ most ardent and concrete wishes.
I wondered whether Mr and Mrs Finlay would be pleased or disappointed to find that their daughter had not entered marriage as blindly as they believed.
Letter No 5, SARAH BERNARD
My Dearest Friend
I confess to you I have written letters I did not want you to see and have kept to myself – so terrible might this place be thought to be even by you who are amongst the mad! But the lun
aticks may not have the wit to be as evil in purpose as is this place. It grieves me you must come one day here for the next stage of your supposed reforming. Though I know you may prove safer in the narrow cell of your category than in the public raucous wards. I have become a friend of the Matron and to tell you this is more a confession of shame than a boast. But it means I am secure from certain things and I have been careful to use my place here to give a little more sugar and tobacco twist to the Irish women around me in the Tory who stand by me when some of their kind would seek to tear me to pieces. Let me tell you this: Steward and Matron Pallmire behave like very emperors and empresses and their quarters are both quarters and storehouse for all they have amassed. They know how things are done and profit by that.
But never mind. I write to tell you I have found a small amount of power over them both. On some nights I sleep in the Matron’s house and sometimes on a litter in a room full of sugar from the West Indies where poor Corporal McWhirter perished. And on such a night Mr Steward Pallmire came to the door and opened it. He was shuddering from rum as you might believe. I said: Go Away! And he looked as shocked as any old tyrant. As shocked if I might say as that old tyrant of yours when the venom cut his breath! I said: Go away sir! Mrs Pallmire will not permit it. He called me a name but just for something to say. And I was surprised I now felt no threat though I had felt much threat earlier. So he turned away and belched and went off like a curbed child. For he knows his wife and I have begun to talk at length. It seems as if she needed a friend. That is the strange thing. They might be kings and queens but lack airs. And they simply do what they do.
I thought then I have some power and must practise at it to bring Alice here. And once here to make her safe! I was all at once redeemed you see.
This letter you might think is all boast. But I am blithe to have a little of my might back – that is all. That is why I write. I will use what is now my influence with Mrs Pallmire. Do not hope over much but hope some! And know that not only a boast do I include on this page but at the same time my true heart.
Bettany's Book Page 34
