The Gulliver Fortune

by Peter Corris

  "Ver' cheap, effendi, ver' cheap, young sir!"

  "I want something that isn't cheap," Jack said.

  Trudie held his arm and stayed closed. With her free hand she raised the skirts of her long dress a little. The strange smells, a mixture of dust and palm oil and body sweat, excited and alarmed her. "Everything's cheap here," she said. "I heard a man in the saloon say you can get a woman for . . . a shilling, I think. Look there, Jacky."

  Jack stopped and looked at the first building in a narrow street which ran at right angles to the rows of festooned stalls and heaped carts and mats with teetering piles of goods. A woman stood in the doorway; her huge dark eyes were rimmed around with still darker paint and a jewel was set on a band that ran across her forehead. Her body was covered, but with thin clothes that seemed to emphasize its curves and hollows. Jack felt his mouth go dry, but he was also aware of the warmth of Trudie pressing against him. They moved on. "What were you doing in the saloon?" he said.

  Trudie laughed, pleased by his jealous concern. "I was trying to talk that salesman into playing cards with you."

  "Will he?"

  "I think so. What are you going to buy me, Jacky?"

  "Anything you want." Jack had turned sixteen and he had measured himself against his father in the gangway outside the cabin. He thought the difference in their height was small. He sweated inside his heavy shirt and jacket. He pulled Trudie out of the path of a beggar who swayed and muttered. "What about some clothes? I could do with something lighter." They moved in the direction of the clothes stalls.

  John Gulliver lifted his eyes to the red-tiled rooftops of the town that had grown up around the port. Palm trees sprouted in pots on the flat roofs, and their leaves brushed against shutters closed against the heat. Ordinarily busy commerce excited and interested him, and the variety of humanity here was a challenge to the merchant—Arabs in long robes, black Africans in loose cotton shirts that reached to their bare feet, heavy-nosed Armenians buttoned into tight suits. The variety was duplicated in the headgear—sun helmets on the Europeans, Arab headcloths, tarbushes and turbans. But the feverish buying and selling in Port Said left him unmoved. He thought of London and felt like an outcast.

  The children clung to him, their hands sticky from the sweets they had bought with Jack's money. Suddenly, Susannah tugged at his sleeve. "Pa, we've lost Carl!"

  Gulliver jerked from his daydream of London. He looked frantically around the bustling, noisy market for the boy. He saw only dark faces and gesticulating hands, metal and jewels flashing in the sun.

  "There, Pa," Susannah said, "by the books."

  Carl had wandered to a stall run by an Oriental. Among the bamboo fans and jade ornaments were several palmleaf baskets filled with books. Carl was squatting, half-concealed, reverentially taking the books from the baskets to examine them. He gazed up at his father with an expression of wonder. "Look, Pa, Byron and Shelley, wonderful editions. How much do you think they might cost?"

  An experienced market hand, Gulliver took his cue from the stall holder who was ignoring Carl and concentrating on a woman displaying mild interest in a jade brooch. "I think you might have to take them by the basketful."

  Carl was shocked. "You can't buy books like that."

  "Why not?" Gulliver teased.

  "It isn't done."

  Gulliver's roar of laughter turned heads. He grinned while the boy haggled for an edition of Shelley and agreed with him that he'd got a bargain. The incident restored his spirits. "Come along, children, I'll buy yez all a lemonade."

  On the way to the lemonade seller they passed the street of houris where Jack and Trudie had paused. The dark eyes and the full languorous bodies touched off fuses of lust and guilt in John Gulliver. He sweated and stood rooted to the spot while his children called to him to hurry. He stumbled after them thinking of his sick wife on board and regretting for the thousandth time the meeting with Christopher Smale in the Sportsman's Guinea that had made him first almost rich and then an exile.

  By the time the Southern Maid was approaching Colombo, the living conditions in steerage were giving the ship's doctor concern. Dr Anderson explained to the purser that the rough, wet weather on the Arabian sea passage had contributed. "They couldn't get out on deck and they huddled in together. Coughs and colds, that sort of thing."

  "I must say some of them smell pretty bad," the purser said with distaste.

  "Well, they couldn't get their clothes dried. The bed linen's in bad order and the rats are increasing."

  The purser sighed. "What are you suggesting?"

  "Fumigate at Colombo."

  "Means putting them all ashore for a couple of days."

  "If we arrive in Fremantle like this we could get a rap over the knuckles. I don't think anyone would be too pleased about that. Anyway," the doctor snapped shut the notebook he'd been writing in, "that's my advice and I've entered it in my log."

  The steerage passengers, accommodated in four seedy harbourside hotels, sweated, itched and quarrelled. Few had light clothes and fewer still adapted well to the spicy food served in the hotels. On the morning of the second day John Gulliver discovered a chair in a shady spot on the verandah where there was also the suspicion of a breeze. The harbour lay in a heat haze and the sprawling, dusty town seemed to be slowly baking like a huge loaf. The temperature had not dropped below ninety degrees and rose to a hundred and ten in the middle of the day. Gulliver draped his jacket over the chair.

  "Ye can't do that!" A big Irishman named Doyle had come onto the verandah. He had climbed three flights of stairs and the sweat was saturating his shirt and waistcoat.

  "It's for my wife," Gulliver explained. "Not for me. I'm just going to get her. She's sick."

  "We're all sick, sick o' this bloody heat." Doyle twitched the jacket from the chair. John Gulliver's control snapped; he moved forward and his short left hook knocked Doyle down. A Tamil servant heard the crash of the Irishman's fall and ran out to the verandah.

  "Bad, sir," he said. "Get police."

  "No," Gulliver said. "Don't get the police. I'm sorry, friend. You're right about the heat. Let me help you up."

  Doyle struggled to his feet unaided. "Damn your help and damn you." He shoved the servant aside and stumped off. Gulliver shrugged, put his jacket back on the chair and went to fetch his wife.

  The children suffered less in the heat. Carl slept and found shady places to read in. Susannah had formed a friendship with a girl of her own age, Mary Welcome, the only child of Digby and Laura Welcome, late of the English stage. "You should see Mama's gowns and Papa's dress suits," Mary said. "They're ever so lovely. Much better than in the pictures." The girls were in the Welcomes' room examining a book of newspaper cuttings. The Whirling Welcomes was a song and dance act that had toured the provinces, with an occasional London booking, for twenty years. Now, with few seasons on the boards ahead of them, the Welcomes had determined to try the colonies.

  Susannah was doubtful. She had seen Mary's parents and thought her father as badly dressed, hot and tired-looking as everyone else. Laura Welcome possessed a kind of sheen that lent some support to Mary's claims. "Where're the gowns now?"

  "In trunks on the ship. Ever such big trunks. Papa says we can live in the trunks if there aren't any houses in Australia. D'you think there will be houses, Susy?"

  "I expect so." Susy was in a dream of chiffon and polished dancing pumps. She turned the pages and marvelled at the fairyland costumes, worn not only by the people on the stage but by those in the audience. The heat in the little room was stifling; she gazed out of the window. The jungle and hills high up above the building line looked even hotter than the town. She swayed as she sat on the bed. Her head felt hot and her mind was wandering. "Where's our Edward, Mary?"

  "Don't you remember? He went for a rickshaw ride with Mama and that nice Mr La Vita."

  "Is Mr La Vita nice?" Susannah remembered only dark eyes and flashing white teeth.

  "Oh, yes. It's terribly hot, but
Mama doesn't seem to mind." Mary was fair like her father and her skin blistered if exposed to the sun for more than a few minutes. Laura Welcome was dark, like Mr La Vita. "They'll have such fun. Can't you just see little Edward when he comes back? Hell say, 'Susy, we saw an elephant, and a crocodile, and a python and . . .' "

  Mary giggled. "And Carl will say, 'The elephant is found in Africa and is the biggest something or other.' " The girls collapsed into laughter.

  Digby Welcome had made his way to the bar of the Oriental Hotel, keeping under shade as much as possible. He had a weakness not for drink but for well-dressed company. He was the son of a clergyman whose education and prospects had been good until he threw both away for Laura and the stage. It mortified him to travel steerage. Digby was of medium height and trimly built. In the right clothes he could look dapper. Now, in celluloid collar and tie, freshly pressed jacket and with his sunhat on his knee, he sat with a gin and tonic in the relative cool of the bar. A fan stirred the air. Digby lay in wait for a familiar face from the ship.

  Dennis 'Rusty' Clarke was about to make his fortune, or so he thought. When he heard he'd been left a plantation by an uncle and that the location of the estate was New Guinea, he thought at first of Africa. Kenya perhaps. Coffee. Occasional trips out there to see how things were going, otherwise a high old life in London on the profits. He'd come down to earth with a bump when he learned that New Guinea was 12,000 miles away on the other side of the world. And no one in the London lawyer's office could tell what crop the plantation produced. It was the London lawyer's first dealing with Sydney, Australia, and Rusty had the feeling that he found the whole thing bad form.

  Rusty's prospects in England had not been good. A clerk in the office of a firm that manufactured shoes, he found the work boring and, as the office was well stocked with relations by blood and marriage of the proprietor, advancement was unlikely. Indeed, the job itself was insecure. Rusty's wife Violet had recently lost their first child. The baby, a boy, hadn't lived an hour. The letter from the lawyer announcing the legacy, unsatisfactory as the details proved, offered a chance, and Rusty and Violet grabbed it.

  Rusty wandered into the bar of the Oriental after a walk which he called privately 'acclimatisation'. New Guinea, he had learned, was very hot. He was travelling second class on money he'd borrowed and scrounged against the day when he would return as a substantial landowner and producer-investor in . . . Rusty had still not decided. He rather fancied rubber. He was a big man and heavily built with a red face, not at all clerk-like. He got a gin sling and looked around for a seat near the fan.

  Digby Welcome pushed a chair away from his table with a highly polished shoe. He raised his glass and caught Rusty's eye. "Have a seat, old man. Scorcher, what?"

  Rusty was a sociable soul. He sat and fanned himself with his hat. "More like a hot bath than anything else."

  Digby smiled. He'd performed strenuously for years in hot, smoky places, often under lights. Perspiration wasn't much of a problem. He looked cool enough as he refused one of Rusty's cigarettes. Digby was concerned about his wind; Laura was several years younger than he. "Yes," Digby said, "Melbourne might be the place for us. I hear it's quite temperate there. Where're you bound? Oh, I beg your pardon—Digby Welcome. I take it you're on the Southern Maid."

  The two men shook hands. "Dennis Clarke. Yes, I'm for New Guinea myself, by way of Sydney."

  Digby relaxed. This was just his sort of thing. Men exchanging views on matters of importance. "New Guinea, eh? How interesting. What line are you in?"

  Rusty puffed on his cigarette. "Rubber, actually," he said.

  5

  'Southern Maid', March 1910

  Dr Anderson diagnosed the first case of typhus when the Southern Maid was three days out from Colombo. The sufferer was an eight-year-old boy travelling steerage who had stayed in the same hotel as the Gullivers. Other cases developed quickly, all among residents of the same hotel. Within a week there were twenty-seven cases that were mild and eight that were serious. On the ship, fear and anxiety ran high. The steerage passengers swept and cleaned their quarters obsessively. Patients were quarantined in the ship's sick bay, where the child whose illness had signalled the epidemic died. Two days later the child's mother, an apparently healthy woman, developed the symptoms—fever, chills, pain and a rash in the armpits—in the most violent form. Within a week of her child's death she too was dead.

  "I can't understand it," the exhausted doctor told the captain, "the child was weak to start with. His death was no surprise. But the mother . . ." He shook his head.

  Roger Duff had been master of vessels like the Southern Maid for thirty years. A Scot without vices, one of the most practical breeds in existence, he had seen everything from epidemics to mutiny and his response to the typhus outbreak had been a calm despatch of Morse code messages and the cautious adoption of a policy that would satisfy all parties. He was proceeding to Fremantle at reduced speed, hoping that the scourge would run its course and that quarantine provisions would be met with relative ease.

  "Carry on, doctor," Duff said. "I'm sure ye're doing all ye can. It's a bad business but people canna expect t'cross the world without risk."

  "Surely they can expect to cross it without dying?" Anderson said bitterly.

  Duff raised his eyebrows. "I'll enter y'r opinion in m' log, but I believe it's a novel notion—not more than fifty years old at the most."

  Three other children and two adults died. Again, the children were sickly to begin with. The doctor questioned the widow and the widower of the dead adults and learned that both of the deceased had had disabilities

  'Dormant tuberculosis and syphilis,' the doctor entered in his journal. "The typhus appears to be of a not particularly virulent kind but is dangerous to the point of fatality to those who are in any way previously weakened.'

  The Gulliver family spent as much time as possible on deck. The doctor examined Susannah closely after her mother reported that the girl had felt feverish in Colombo. He found no signs of the pestilence. The next day Catherine Gulliver fell in a dead faint at the ship's rail where she had been leaning. John Gulliver put the children in the care of whoever would have them and attempted to nurse his wife, but she weakened by the hour. In the sick bay she confided to the doctor that she was pregnant.

  Anderson examined her. "Seven months at least."

  "Oh, God," Catherine said. "Longer than I thought. My poor children. Doctor," she gripped Anderson's arm with a strength that surprised him, "my husband does not know. I didn't want to worry him while we made this change and we haven't . . ."

  "I see. This is very serious, Mrs Gulliver. You must rest."

  Catherine convulsed and screamed. The next few hours were a nightmare for the doctor and his assistants and living hell for John Gulliver. The bacteria infecting Catherine's body triggered what the doctor expected to be a painful and bloody miscarriage. He assisted the delivery, paying almost no attention to the foetus and concentrating his efforts on relieving the suffering of the mother. The baby was male and large.

  "It's alive, doctor," the nurse said.

  "Not for long, I'll be bound. She's haemorrhaging! Don't worry about it, woman. Help here!"

  The child, grey-green like a skinned rabbit, dribbled mucus from its pipes and whimpered. The nurse, working frantically in the narrow space partitioned off within the sick bay, attended to it virtually with one hand while she applied towels and cold cloths. The nurse was a Roman Catholic, doctrinally strict. She struggled to save both souls, but the mother bled to death, despite her efforts. The child lived but was given no chance of long-term survival by Anderson, the sceptic, who had had almost no sleep for seventy-two hours.

  "This place is a mortuary and a hospital combined," he said. "It can't be a nursery as well."

  The nurse nodded. She had washed the infant and swaddled it. She held it in her arms while the doctor drew a sheet over the body of its mother. "Ill have the purser tell Mr Gulliver," she said. "The p
oor man."

  "Hurry, please," Anderson said, "We've others to attend to."

  The nurse left the sick bay. If she'd been at home in Dublin she'd have gone straight to the priest; here and now she needed a different kind of help. She crossed herself, said a prayer and hurried.

  John Gulliver felt a terrible pain deep inside his body as the purser framed the words. He thought his heart had stopped or that the breath in his lungs would be his last. Kitty can't be dead, he thought. It's not possible. He shook his head.

  "I'm sorry, Mr Gulliver. The doctor did all he could. I'm terribly sorry to have to tell you this, but your wife will have to be buried at sea, and quickly. Do you understand, sir?" It was not the purser's habit to so address steerage passengers but something about Gulliver impelled him to use the word.

  "Yes. I understand."

  "I'll make the arrangements and inform you." The purser said nothing about the child, of whom he knew nothing.

  "Thank you," Gulliver said. "I want to see her."

  "I don't advise it, sir. The infection . . ."

  "I saw her every day for sixteen years and I will see her today."

  The purser nodded. He felt as if he should salute Gulliver or shake his hand, but it would be ridiculous to do so. He went to the sick bay to tell the doctor of Gulliver's wish but Anderson was snatching an hour's sleep in his cabin. He stood, undecided, outside the partitioned corner where Catherine Gulliver had died. Her husband approached and he stood aside.

  John Gulliver wandered about the ship. He stood at the stern rail and stared out at the churning water. Scenes from his life with Catherine glowed in his mind. He remembered their first lovemaking on the barge, Jack's birth, the cooking smells in the succession of single rooms where they had lived, slept and eaten, and made love and had more children. His mind flicked to his erstwhile partner and nemesis, Christopher Smale—his easy manners, ready money and way of treating everything as a joke.