by David Malouf
When the house was finished whole troops of people had come out from Bowen to see it; some because it was such a wonder – Bowen, for all that it was a town, had nothing like it; others in the hope that the house, once it was set up, with all the cane chairs in place and the carved chests there to be opened and shown, and the beds made, and one or two pictures hung, might solve the mystery at last by giving away what the ladies themselves would not. But they were disappointing even in this. The house might have flown through the air and landed, plump down, from some seaport up north that they had barely heard of, it was so unlike anything you would see here. If it had information to give away, they couldn’t fathom it. It was in a language they could not read.
It was very light and airy, very open. The cane furniture gave it an easy look, but worried them. A chair ought to be solid. All this lacy lightness suggested – but there they were baulked. Their minds stopped short. They sat in the chairs, and from that vantage looked around at the tongue-and-groove walls, which were mostly bare, but no answer came to them. Was it the past or the future they were looking at? If the past, it was not their past. If the future – well, on the whole they did not care for it. Nor did they care for the fact that Mrs Hutchence, once she was in her own home, turned slovenly, as she had not been when she lived at Mrs Blaine’s. Her bombazine was all spattered with mud, she wore boots –well so did they, most of them, but they didn’t live in a house with five rooms plus verandah, with furniture of woven cane, and serve tea in china cups, bone china, Bavarian it seemed, or have a daughter or goddaughter, or niece perhaps, or companion, who wore her hair with a comb in it and looked like a large, dark-eyed doll.
Some echo of this had already reached George; so had the opinions of one or two local youths who, for reasons they could not have explained, had at sight of the house felt indignant, as they hadn’t been when the old girl first got hold of them. That had been a kind of joke; they had had the advantage of their youth, and of her accent and plain oddity. But the house, floating six feet above ground on its stumps, the cool superiority with which it lay claim to light and air, not to speak of the landscape it stood in, evoked a sense of raw inadequacy in them.
There was an ironwork scraper at the door. They watched and then looked away as Mrs Hutchence dragged her boots across it.
Inside, polished floors that met the soles of their feet with a disturbing stickiness. Most of all, the young woman, the niece or daughter, Leona, whose manner and dress, they had to admit, were wonderful, though none of them could venture what age she might be: ‘Thirty at least,’ they scoffed when they told of the visit afterwards. She had insisted they sit up at the table, their youth now a cheap handicap, though they were defiant in it, to talk while they drank tea.
Most of them went just the once and turned the occasion, so far as they could manage, into a joke in which it was the house and its two female inhabitants that had been on the wrong side of things. They did not mention the humiliation of the scraper or the strange mixture of embarrassment and wonder that had come to them when they looked back and saw the prints they had left, big-toed and dusty on the boards. If Mrs Hutchence hailed them now – she never forgot a name or face – they went suddenly deaf.
‘Well, here we are.’
And there it was, not at all as grand as rumour had it, rather raw and unfinished with its unpainted, corrugated iron roof, but a real house nonetheless, sitting in a patch that had been cleared and scuffled and in the fierce heat was already sprouting weeds.
The columns that supported the verandah roof had bevelled edges, and someone had taken the trouble to give them squared-off capitals. Walls of crisscrossed lattice were set in the arches between, and on either side of the wide wooden steps stood urns, empty as yet, but classic and garlanded.
He dragged the branch, as Mrs Hutchence directed, into the half-darkness under the house, then, surprised to hear a scurry of footsteps overhead, followed her up the steps to the verandah, then on into the cool interior, which he saw, with a start of emotion, was a real room, the first he had been in for more than a year. It was like stepping back into a dream place, though the wicker chairs and little bamboo stands made it too exotic to be familiar. The nostalgia it evoked in him was for a place he might have read about and only imperfectly imagined. So it was a shock when she led him through into the kitchen and he found that of the party they were interrupting, which immediately fell silent, all its members, save one, he already knew.
Gemmy Fairley was there with the two little McIvor girls, also Hec Gosper, who coloured and immediately assumed, George thought, a hostile air; and standing at the entrance to the corrugated iron recess where the stove was set, Miss Gonzales, as Mrs Hutchence called her before she gave the young woman her other name, which it seemed he was invited to use. ‘This is George,’ she told them.
‘Abbot,’ he felt obliged to add.
Hec Gosper dropped his chin to hide a smile. The two little girls, who looked very uncomfortable, pushed their noses into their tea mugs. Gemmy, with a helpless gesture and sounds of inarticulate explanation, pushed past him and fled.
‘George has been a great help,’ Mrs Hutchence announced. ‘Sit down, George. I found a nice piece of firewood, Leona, and George very kindly offered – a cup, Janet. You can choose, pet. Any one you like.’
He seated himself at the pine table, and Hec Gosper shifted to make way for him but remained unfriendly. The older of the McIvor children brought a good teacup and saucer, though the others, he saw, had mugs. Hec Gosper saw it too.
‘Well,’ he said sulkily, ‘I better be off.’
It was Leona who restrained him.
‘Dear me, why? Mr Abbot won’t mind our bit of fun, will you Mr Abbot? We’re all very easy here. We’ve been telling fortunes –’
Hec Gosper blushed furiously. The truth was that he had, till now, been the centre of such gallantries as the afternoon demanded and had acquitted himself pretty well, he thought. He was mortified that he should now be shown up before this schoolteacher. The fortune-telling was all nonsense, an excuse for Leona and him to play little games with one another that the McIvor girls, he thought, were too young to observe.
He was wrong in this. That was because he was too young. Janet knew only too well what was going on, and was fascinated, because Hector, she knew, was not much more than seventeen, whereas Leona, as far as she could work out, was – well, twenty-five at least. She knew this because when she was helping Mrs Hutchence down at the hives, Mrs Hutchence talked, and was full of stories about this place and that – they had moved about a good deal – which, if Janet had been able to put them together, would have afforded her larger glimpses of the two women’s lives than anyone else had been party to, only she did not have the experience quite to form a picture of travelling gentlemen, some of them ships’ captains, or billiard tables, or cooks who had no idea of what Brown Soup should be. She was more occupied, just for now, with the things Mrs Hutchence had to show: her china, which was bone china, which meant that when you held a cup up to the light by its delicate handle you could see through it; or the bolts of coloured silk the camphor wood chests were crammed with. These chests were themselves marvellous. They were carved all over with figures so raised that you could close your eyes, trace them with a finger, and still see processions through gardens of cherry trees and willows, with birds among the leaves, and little far-off pavilions.
‘Well,’ Hec Gosper said, reluctantly accepting to remain and see the thing through. Taking the tin mug in his fist, as if to make clear that he knew, only too well, how he had been slighted, he hid his discomfiture, and his lip, which he suddenly felt the mark of.
Leona saw the trouble he was in. She took the mug he had set down, gave him a look that might have been conciliatory but might also, he thought, be a provocation, and poured him tea from the big blue china pot she hauled from the stove, and as she did so, leaned down and whispered in his ear. Only then did she fill the teacup for George.
&nb
sp; ‘Silly!’ That was what she had told Hector in her half-whisper, though they all heard it, and you could actually see the glow that came to the boy’s soul. Janet did. She was fond of Hector, and not very fond, after all, of the schoolteacher.
There was a little rise of tension in the room. Leona, standing very tall beside the table, long-necked and with her hair darkly braided, was as overdressed for the occasion, George thought, as he was. They made a pair.
Her frock was of light cotton. ‘Freshly laundered’ was how he thought of it. Its blue lifted his heart. But his chief impression was that she was scented, and he associated that with the little half-opened rosebuds, pink on white, with which her wide collar was embroidered. The smoothness of the fine-drawn stitches moved him. They spoke of refinements he had thought he might never see again, and as he stared at them, and at the slight lifting of her breasts, he felt once again how isolated he had been in the last months, what a savage he had become. He was happy now to let some of the daintiness of those miniature emblems of ‘garden’, ‘summer’, ‘home’, which he had so much missed, attach itself to the girl; the Englishness too, though her complexion was too dark for it.
Leona wavered. A crease came to her brow. He was something new, this schoolmaster. Even if he was at first sight more awkward than some others, Hector for example, he had a background, he knew something of the world. It embarrassed her that she had been caught out in a game with children, for Hector too was that, however he might stroke his moustache and swagger.
George sensed the little catch of interest in her and felt his confidence lift. If he was let down by anything it was the state of his shirt-cuffs, which were very grubby. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down to hide them, and noticed, as he did, the dirt that was ingrained in the knuckles of his big hands – even Hector’s, he saw, were cleaner. How careless he had allowed himself to become! His hair, for example. He ran his hand through it. It was a bird’s nest; whereas Hector’s – Hector was altogether, for all his overgrown limbs and the harelip, very neat, and was not barefooted but wore flash new boots.
George was surprised how keen his return to society had made him. He felt the resurgence of his old vigour, and his soul leapt forward to a time when he and Leona, Miss Gonzales (he preferred to think of her, for the moment, in this more formal way, it set them further apart from the others) would be frank with one another, and tenderly, touchingly close. A conversation in this mode began in his head, and under the influence of the pleasure it provided, his whole being soared, as if the book in his pocket, which he had forgotten, had been transformed along with the rest of him, and was fluttering over the table in the form of a putto with rainbow-coloured wings enclosing a face of quite cherubic innocence, and no discommodious body at all.
Leona, meanwhile, had taken charge of the occasion; in a rather schoolmistressly way, George thought with some amusement. Was she mocking him? If so, he did not resent it. Quite the contrary. He was surprised what a pleasure it was to give in to her authority and be relieved of his own; to be playfully bossed; even if it set him at the same level as Hector Gosper. He had, suddenly, a tender fellow feeling for the harelipped youth that dissolved all rivalry between them in a common response to the rather bantering tone in which Miss Leona softly bound and ruled them. It was a reflection, this, of their shared youthfulness. Hector too bucked up and lost a little of his edgy watchfulness.
The two little girls were astonished by the turn things had taken. They were used to these afternoons when Hector or one of the other boys turned up – it was usually Hector – and the teasing way Leona treated them, but had not expected her to treat Mr Abbot so. Even less that he should accept it, though Janet saw after a little that this was another version of the fortune-telling, only this time the game was between Leona and Mr Abbot.
She saw something else as well. That in playing his part Mr Abbot had no more to do than Hector had. They only thought they were playing, because Leona managed things so cleverly, putting words into their mouth that they had never in fact spoken, and taking both parts herself. Janet was surprised how clear this was to her. The world recently, she thought, kept reaching out to show her things, to catch her attention and enlighten her.
‘That’s better children,’ Mrs Hutchence said, ‘that’s what I like to see.’ She herself had said nothing. She sat listening, but everything, you felt, was contained by her listening, and without it would have been different.
After a time, Mrs Hutchence and Janet went off to attend to the bees. George, Leona and Hector were left alone – but not quite alone. The smaller of the McIvor girls stayed behind, not quite discouraged, George thought, by Leona. She watched them thoughtfully from the end of the table, and when they went out to the back verandah to see Mrs Hutchence and Janet moving about in sunbonnets and veils in a grove below the house, she sat on a woodblock with her elbows on her knees and her chin supported on her fists, missing nothing that passed between them. George wondered if it was just childish curiosity or a kind of jealous love that made her so narrowly watchful, but whether it was for Leona or Hector he could not tell.
Their talk was desultory now. Leona might have been bored with them. There were silences in which George felt at a loss, as if it was up to him now to justify the place she had offered him with some demonstration of gallantry or wit, but the conversation he had begun in his head, which was so full of frankness and intimacy, belonged to the future; he could not catch its tone in the present and he embarrassed himself by asking, out of terror at the gap that had opened, which was too full of the afternoon light and the little McIvor girl’s eyes, a question, a direct one, which was in itself of no importance but was put in a manner too blunt, almost brutal – he saw that as soon as the words were out. Miss Leona looked grieved, as if she might, after all, have been mistaken in him. What dismayed him was that he should have made such an error, when he was otherwise in a state of such heightened sensitivity.
It did not escape him, even in the midst of his confusion, that a little self-satisfied smile had come to the corner of Hector’s mouth, which he was trying to hide by looking very fixedly at his own immaculate boots, while, with his hands in his pockets, he shifted his weight back and forth so that the silence was filled with their cheeping. Was he really, George wondered, the more self-possessed of the two, or was it only that he had discovered, over time, how to fall in with the girl’s rather perplexing demands?
But Leona was generous. She did not make him suffer for his lapse. ‘Ma,’ she began, ‘– I call her Ma, you know, though we aren’t related – Ma,’ she went on, ‘has taken a great liking, George – she doesn’t always, you know. Normally – but why should that surprise you? She’s sharp, Ma, very, you’d be astonished at what she can see in people, and at first glance too. She has seen something in you – in Hector too, though not in just anybody, she isn’t general. She sees into people, it’s a gift. And usually they know it immediately – Hector did, didn’t you Hector? – and feel easy with her. That’s why we’re all so free here. It isn’t me, I’m not easy. But she is, you’ve no idea. And good too. Wonderfully. She’s been wonderfully good to me.’
George had no idea what all this meant, and doubted, from the look of him, that Hector did either; but he did feel easy, and understood that Leona was not speaking only for her Ma.
From where they stood at the verandah’s rails, he watched that shadowy figure, with the smaller one at her side, move about among the square bee-boxes, loosing clouds of smoke out of her sleeves, and felt a pleasant drowsiness and lack of concern for himself, an assurance that he could leave now and come back, and when he did there would be a place for him.
‘I should be off,’ he said. It did not bother him that he was leaving the field to Hector, who had, after all, waited him out.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘But you will come again.’
He agreed, and set off over the lumpy yard. He did not have to look back to know that Hector and the tall young woman were watching hi
m go, with the little McIvor girl at Leona’s skirts. He was filled with a sense of his own lightness. Some heavier self had been laid asleep in him, and another woken that was all open to the westering glow in which the drab bush trees along his way found a kind of beauty, all their leaves glancing and the earth under them alight along its ridges, and the sky above a show, a carnival, of cloud shapes transforming themselves from forms he could name to others, equally pleasing, that he had no name for, but did not for that reason feel estranged from; he might, he thought, have a name for those later. He had the feeling that there were many things in the world that were still to come to him.
The conversation he had begun back there, he again caught up with. He had been unaware, in his preoccupation with the trees and the sky, that it had been going on all this time at the bottom of his thought. He let it lead him, and was already lost in its pleasant intricacies when he saw, hunkered down beside the track, a figure that startled him at first, and then, when he saw who it was, moved him in a way he had not expected.
It was Gemmy Fairley waiting for the McIvor girls, to see them home. He would have greeted the fellow, and found he was disappointed when Gemmy kept his head lowered, and would not look up to receive the gesture he meant to make.
9
GEMMY FAIRLEY HAD been in the settlement for almost a year. He was working alone one afternoon, slapping fresh planks onto the side of a shed, when he felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen. He swung round with the hammer raised and they were already on him, two blacks, an old man and a youth, standing quietly just feet away. He had not heard them coming. Making a sign that a white observer would have missed, he dropped his gaze, lowered himself painfully into a cross-legged position, and waited. The two blacks followed and they sat, all three, in a clump, just where they were.
