The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  A world of our own.

  Easily I settle into the routine. My eyes have never sailed over horizons, that giddy tipping beyond the ledge into the vortex. There are no great unassuaged departures within me, more’s the pity, but I have come to terms with my own stolidity of purpose.

  That Leonie! That Claire! They tackle me for my rigid respectability. They laugh secretly in their room and when questioned turn butter-smooth, milk-innocent faces towards me and conceal books whose titles I cannot catch. Who is supplying them? There is a piano in the sitting-room where Leonie spends much time on the salt-rackety instrument pounding out études and sonatas, a storm of notes like leaves. She tends to perform after dinner, quite deliberately courting the delight of Doctor Quigley who sometimes sings to her accompaniment, one plump hand on the piano lid. He has a rich and romantic tenor. Too rich. Too romantic. Leonie has a way of looking up at him as he throbs to a diminuendo in a fashion that drives Matron Tullman into silent and jealous fury. I get more pleasure from watching the matron than listening to my prodigy of a daughter. Perhaps my principles are foundering.

  Picture this!

  And picture this building crouched under palm and strangler fig and barringtonia thickets on a knoll a few hundred yards from that shattering ultramarine with its endless white scrolls. Bougainvillea tears relentlessly at trellises. The Quisqualis indica invades windows. Allamanda shouts through. And picture us. I sense my daughters speak in riddles.

  ‘How is it,’ Claire asks idiotically one morning at breakfast, the doctor arriving late and flustered from some earlier assignation, ‘that waves break on our beach one way and break in exactly the opposite direction on the mainland?’

  I would have thought the matter self-evident.

  I watch Doctor Quigley smile. We sit separately from the guests but his ears are always a-quiver for any opportunity of speaking with the girls. We have, after all, become an informal little group, though first names are not yet bandied.

  ‘I don’t know, dear,’ I say. ‘Being ignorant of geographical physics.’

  Claire wrinkles her nose so adorably that Doctor Quigley sets down his knife and fork and saunters over to our table, rolling ever so slightly. For a man not yet forty he has a tendency to corpulence, his flesh an amusing contrast to that clutched-at doctor dignity, though a diminution of it as well. Matron Tullman—exhausted? jaded? and also late for breakfast—smiles over-brightly across the room and inclines her head graciously, straining after non-concern at her lover’s easily distracted attention.

  The good doctor hovers. He places his teacup beside Claire’s, queries me May I? with raised eyebrows and pulls a chair over from one of the empty tables. The missionaries nod and smile and nod.

  ‘Of course.’ I think my vowels have confounded him, brought him to social heel, as it were. Was he expecting some rough-voiced hag of a landlady in early morning hair-curlers with a vocabulary to match? (Stupid man, I say inwardly.) His graciousness has increased markedly over the weeks.

  ‘You see—’ one pudding hand rests for the smallest moment on Claire’s shoulder, insisting he is a teddy bear of a daddy for the poor fatherless girl, and then flies to his cup over which he gazes comically, ‘it’s a question of tides. Very basic. Ebb from the mainland brings the sea washing here on our western beach. High tide takes the water onto the eastern mainland, breaking there. Understand?’

  His eyebrows crinkle like those of a concerned teacher during a pedagogical crisis. Claire is prettily flushed with this attention. ‘And there’s the slope of the seabed as well, the shelving up each way, here and on the mainland. It all—’ At last he takes a sip from his cup and replaces it gently and does ignorance-admitting gestures with drolly spread fingers.

  ‘Not quite. Not really.’

  Doctor Quigley gives a sigh.

  ‘Never mind, my dear. It will inevitably proceed.’

  That nominative of address flutters across the room to rest lightly in each of Matron Tullman’s busy eyes.

  What would I know about expectation who have none beyond the present? As I say, my eyes have never sailed over horizons. But if. But if.

  I might have seen into the future along with those flitting black shapes who drifted through trees about the settlement, apparently ignoring the white faces of authority. I try to know them. Sometimes I believe I have the trust of my housegirls. Their brown skins shiver with pleasure when I give them discarded dresses Claire and Leonie no longer wear. ‘You mustn’t spoil them,’ warns Captain Brodie. ‘They will take advantage. You should talk with my wife.’

  Late afternoon. Set the scene. There has been a sudden rainstorm battering the leaves, the iron roof, the Rangoon creeper.

  Through the open shutters the pith helmet sported by the superintendent slips busily above the crest of the shrubs lining the path to our verandah. That helmet, his tropic badge of office, is dented and sloppy with rain. But he persistently wears it, boss regalia. Even when he’s closest to standing still, the old twitcher, there’s a swagger to him but this is lost somehow when he moves faster, as now—business afoot—in a kind of menacing glide.

  There are island rumours.

  He’s a tosspot.

  He’s a flogger.

  He’s a power-drunk despot at loggerheads with his deputy and the doctor.

  Alternatively, the blacks are fond of him. His aloofness is reserved for staff.

  He’s devoted to his wife.

  He adores his children.

  Menacing? I’m wise after the event.

  His wife is a self-effacing woman—I could have said hangdog—absorbed in her children, Davey aged twelve and Barbara a year younger. She makes gentle amends to the blacks for the jocular bullying of her husband, the intemperate rages of Jardine at the workshops, the meanness of storekeeper Cole on ration days.

  And she is pregnant.

  The overtones of this place refuse summation in a simple melodic line.

  We’re a dumping ground, a kind of island penal colony. What a mix comes here: half-castes snatched from fringe settlements around back country towns on the mainland, petty criminals, syphilitics, lepers en route to U-millie’s lazaret across the water, and those unfortunates who’ve served time for drunkenness or simply for flight from white interference. Leonie and Claire are being confronted fast with the facts of democracy but remain good-humoured and outgoing—sometimes I think too outgoing. Leonie is outspoken for her years. This place has made her cynical.

  How do I explain away slavery to girls brought up to believe they live in an egalitarian all-mates-together paradise? Who own dog-eared history books with accounts penned in sanctimonious horror of the evils of the British slave trade?

  ‘We need a Wilberforce here,’ my angry Leonie announced one day after returning the superintendent’s children to their bungalow in Coconut Avenue where she had heard their father shouting at young Danny Tombo who was mowing the lawns. Why, she had asked the superintendent, is there still slavery on Doebin when Britain abolished it in all her colonies just one hundred years ago? (The poor child was ahead of her time. She didn’t know women weren’t supposed to have opinions.) Behind Captain Brodie’s angry smile, instant reprimands for sauce swarmed and struggled for release. ‘His face,’ she reported with satisfaction, ‘became rather twisted.’ Ignoring cautionary nudges from Claire, Leonie maintained features of innocent puzzlement that maddened further. ‘Do not,’ she reported his replying, ‘meddle in things you do not understand.’ Then he had added somewhat irrelevantly, ‘The then Prince of Wales would travel miles to hear Wilberforce sing, did you know?’

  ‘I think he’s quite mad,’ Leonie said.

  For a week I discouraged the girls from visiting, despite the protests of Mrs Brodie who was grateful for the respite their presence gave. She was confounded by masculine command as well as heat. To say nothing of her pregnancy. Daily she had grown paler, and instead of blooming with prospective motherhood looked dreadfully ill.

  Yet the week af
ter, there was a surprise for us all.

  Father Donellan arrives by Church launch, the Little Flower, to celebrate Mass at the settlement and chivvy the lady missionaries into departure.

  A first Mass. Imagine it! All those wondering marvelling blacks clustered around the makeshift altar in the sitting-room where my girls had been arranging chairs that morning. The magic of vestments! The alb. The green chasuble. The chalice. The consecrated wafer. Do the islanders link this ritual in their minds with the god of the big footprint on Cape Grafton? Is it a songline they hear as Father Donellan chants the Latin? Davey Brodie who is home from a Brothers’ boarding school in Townsville explains what is going on. More or less. He is acting as altar boy as well. The blacks love his red and white, his scrubbed face, his hands bearing the cup. The soft water-beat of ancient language is not so much translated into the dust-mutter of our own island pidgin as paraphrased in a whispered account. Davey’s cheerful face is snubly serious.

  Does the little gathering understand the juju?

  Do I? Do any of us really? Only the old hands of the Roman rite are absorbed by something, I realise now, I had missed for months: the calm of predicted and predictable prayer.

  Mrs Brodie, whiter than death in the morning heat despite a seat near the open doors to the verandah, leans weakly against the wall. She has been bed-bound for a fortnight and Doctor Quigley seems unable to do more than move her through a variety of useless potions and advise rest. Captain Brodie has kept his Protestant self away with the excuse that he must inspect two family groups on the eastern side of the island. The far side.

  And then the hard rain battering in waves outside this room, drowning the soft rain of Latin inside, and suddenly the weakest of cries from Mrs Brodie, swaying, dropping forward from her chair during the nunc dimittis with the blood running down her legs to the floor, the terrible red of it, her face drained as the body drains and her daughter clutching an arm to help her stumble out before Father Donellan can raise his hand in the final blessing.

  An omen of chaos.

  Of course I try to help. Of course I try to propel her to a bedroom. It is as if she is determined on martyrdom, whimpering with pain and bleeding, bleeding, as my own girls rush with umbrellas and send Barbara off ahead. Doctor Quigley also has trotted after the group, shouting for carriers from the alarmed congregation. But the men are unwilling. Female blood horrifies, is tabu. Furious, he gathers frail Mrs Brodie up and with my daughters protecting the pair from sky-gush flounders down the slope to the road and up towards the tiny hospital.

  I was torn, I admit it, between womanly and social obligations.

  Father Donellan’s bemused uselessness has won. He will call on her later and define his embarrassment and sympathy with well-meant Christian platitudes and even while he murmurs, appalled and flummoxed, about the matter, he is busy with vestments, the satin sheen of chasuble, the unbloodied whiteness of alb, until he reappears in clerical black to the twenty or so wondering black faces. Davey Brodie, too, is running through rain, still in his altar boy’s cassock, stumbling after his mother.

  Has the Mass been ruined? Or is this another, a parallel, form?

  Something is marred. Father smiles on the shy hands of children who reach out to touch or stroke the silkiness of maniple, of stole. ‘Och, there now,’ he is saying to me and to them in his begorrah voice, ‘there now.’

  My mind is blotted by the memory of Mrs Brodie’s white and gasping face. And the blood. As I serve tea, another sort of communion, I try to ascertain how long it will be before once again I have to uproot my family, but Father Donellan is religiously vague and keeps assuring me I am doing a wonderful job.

  ‘It’s the ladies, you understand, the missionaries…um…Miss Weber and Miss Starck. They really must leave by the end of the week. The bishop insists. Good women but a different faith. Yes. Good women.’ Silence falls. ‘But misguided perhaps. Still, one mustn’t…’ Et cetera, et cetera. Is this bigotry? I am glad outspoken Leonie hasn’t heard his ripe Irish rationalisations. I let him dither against the wave-sound of rain. Thinking of Mrs Brodie. Sipping our tea. Sipping and possibly bleeding. ‘They mean well but surely it’s better, indeed I have to believe it is better,’ a wry smile in my direction, ‘to introduce the one true faith rather than a variety of Christian…’

  Exasperated I suggest we are all on the same road ultimately and see only the superintendent’s wife racked on her road to the hospital, hoping that by now she is safely sheltered, intelligently cared for. I can think of little else.

  Father Donellan regards me with a speculative eye.

  ‘Now, that’s not what I like to hear from a good convent girl like you. Goodness gracious, whatever has got into everyone?’

  And a second surprise.

  Miss Starck and Miss Weber depart. I will miss their honest to God good-heartedness, their sensible sandals, washed-out sacks of dresses, their rigid refusal to gossip. The islanders will miss them too. In their place arrives Gerald Morrow. He is supposed to be here to assist Jardine, the handyman who looks after the boats, the generator, the building programme. He would need lessons in coarseness to cope.

  Someone has made a terrible mistake. He doesn’t know a hammer from a spade. Captain Brodie strides by frowning, scowling at bureaucratic incompetence. The mainland office is to blame. Mr Morrow, of course, appears indifferent to the upset. He helps Mr Cole on ration days, handles the curfew bells, calls roll for the work lines. At mealtimes he shares a table with Mr Vine and they indulge their temporariness in quiet exchanges I can never quite catch. Leonie and Claire assure me I’m not missing a thing. ‘It’s Mr Jardine you should hear,’ they giggle.

  Bells punctuate our days. They need explanation.

  At seven-thirty to rouse the blacks. Again at eight to line them up for tea and damper. Then they work: men on the government gardens, on the roads, cutting cordwood in the mangroves, building; the women are housegirls, cleaners, they help at the clinic. Wednesdays are free for the non-paid workers to spend at their bladey-grass huts. Rations come to bells when the islanders line up for portions of sugar and flour, bully beef and rice. Ah, paradise! They cannot marry without permission from the superintendent. I have visited the boys’ and the girls’ dormitories, even the dungeon-like detention cells, and have seen the filthy blankets, the cockroaches, the stains of despair.

  As if that weren’t sufficient chastening, there is the more formal kind. Leonie tells me that while she was out walking with Claire they came across a young man, Willie Omba, handcuffed to a tree. He kept asking them for water and they ran all the way back to Shippers Vale to fetch a canister, but when they returned Captain Brodie was waiting and angrily ordered them off. And the women! Last week Essie turned up with her head shaved to the skull. Between her sniffles and tears I discovered: she had crept out from the dormitory after curfew to be with her boyfriend. She’s lucky she wasn’t put to sweeping the streets like that, a practice common enough. ‘Mother!’ Leonie cries furiously, ‘Why is it only the women who are punished?’ I cannot answer that age-old question. Essie was so humbled she couldn’t look at me for days.

  Is this a Christian settlement? It is hard to believe so in this nearly arrived decade of the 1930s.

  Diversion. An odd thing happened this week.

  Doctor Quigley has been bringing a book with him to breakfast each morning the last few days and, though I have strenuously discouraged my daughters from such unmannerly practice, he sits there, letting his breakfast cool, snorting and chuckling.

  ‘Have you read this?’ he asked Mr Vine, sauntering across, one plump finger marking a passage, and forgetting his cooling breakfast. ‘“Leaves from a Squatter’s Journal”.’ He suddenly shouted with laughter. ‘Leavings, more like it! Well well well! Laundered vignettes of life in the far northwest. But,’ here he laid the book flat on the schoolteacher’s toast and leant over him, ‘do you teach a kid called Billy Cooktown? You do? Well, I must tell you his grandmama was fucked by some o
f the best upper-class blood in England. Ah, England my England! Well, not mine, precisely, being county Galway, but…So the next time you and Brodie speak discourteously to Billy and especially his grandmama, Rosie, try to remember, old chap, that Billy’s grandpapa was a Rugby boy!’

  Of course I can’t have language like that in the dining-room though my girls, strangely enough, are taking it in their stride. (Mr Jardine, no doubt.) And making a fuss would only emphasise. I shall, I decide, speak privately to him later. In the meantime, Doctor Quigley is embroidering his fantasy. How he would love, he is booming across the table, to take old Rosie Cooktown and Billy back to England and escort them to Billy’s grandpa’s old school. Especially on old boys’ reunion day. ‘I wish,’ he parodied, ‘to see my grandpa’s school!’

  Mr Vine coughs with embarrassment. ‘Billy’s a good reader,’ he says. ‘A bright lad.’

  ‘It’s that dash of privileged blood, doubtless.’ Doctor Quigley winks at smiling Leonie and comes back to his inedible eggs.

  Cultural bias. I share it with him. What else have I been taught in a country that enslaved those whom it didn’t murder or exploit sexually? I must ask Father Donellan about these irreconcilables when he next visits. Or should I? I don’t want to be put off with pious blarney.

  ‘Indade you don’t,’ comments perceptive Leonie who can read my thoughts.

  Meanwhile Doctor Quigley is saying loudly in our direction, ‘You must forgive me, ladies. The verb I used is of uncertain Middle English origin, possibly ‘fuken’, doubtless derived but unproven from the German ficken, to strike, the Latin futuere, the Greek phytuein, and the French foutre. Mr Vine will support me in this, I have no doubt.’

  Mr Vine refuses the bait.

  His days are numbered here. He’s a time-filler before leaving for his mainland appointment at a small failing boarding school that concentrates on pupils from grazing properties in the Gulf country. Here he is, a graduate from St Andrews, currently teaching reading and addition on Doebin Island. There’s a certain idiocy in this. He seems to have no notion at all of how to deal with primitive educational needs. ‘I entertain them,’ he apologises, edging his tall gaunt body, hedging enquiry. He tells us little about himself. ‘After all, it’s only till the new year. I’m obliging the government. Morrow and I are both mistakes.’