Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

  Leo at that began his lopsided walk again, and Jeff Murcutt, with a grin, brought his arm up like a shotgun and followed Leo round the circle. There was a breathless moment in. which boys of ten, eleven, some of them almost thirteen as Lachlan was, were soul-struck as he himself had been, that first day at the fence, by the evocation of arms. Jeff Murcutt stood empowered in the midst of them, actually changed, himself impressed almost to awe by what he was reaching for, and Leo hovered. Then Jeff’s lips moved. ‘Bang!’ he said, not loud.

  The puff of air out of his mouth struck Leo in the chest. He hung in the air, mouth open, head thrown back, one hand at his breast, and they watched him, slowly, buckle at the knees and fall.

  It was in the same playground circle, two days later, that he heard of the night attack.

  He had known at breakfast that something was amiss but nothing was said, and it was a sign of how things had changed among them that he dared not ask. His aunt fussed and looked strained, his uncle was soft with him. He kept looking from one to the other waiting for enlightenment.

  ‘I hear you had a bit of strife last night,’ Jeff Murcutt announced. The others looked interested; they knew no more, Lachlan saw, than he did. He narrowed his eyes and did not respond, but felt his heart knock against his ribcage and knew, from the sudden dizziness he felt, that he had gone pale. Let Jeff Murcutt tell, if he knew something. But all he did was stand smirking, with his head down and his toes scuffing the dust.

  It was Jed Corcoran, poor dumb Jed, who did the asking. He thought he was the only one who did not know.

  ‘What strife? What happened?’ he said in his babyish, snot-thickened voice.

  ‘He knows,’ Jeff Murcutt told him.

  Jed Corcoran turned his soft eyes on him. ‘What Locky? What happened?’

  Lachlan turned and strode away. ‘What?’ he heard Jed ask again. ‘I din’ hear nothing.’

  He felt betrayed on all sides. That Janet had been there, and he had not. That he had slept through it like a mere kid. That they had let him sleep, as if he could be no help, and had afterwards kept it from him!

  It was his aunt who told him the details at last, white-faced, taut as a wire, speaking through clenched lips. He understood how his uncle felt because he too felt the power drain from him and the stab of fear; not at what he might have to face – he would face anything, he was brave enough – but at what he might have to admit of the way the world was, and how his failure to see it was a weakness in him.

  He did not go to school. He took his gun and went off into the bush, but all he did was sit, hunched up with the gun in his lap, trying to see how they could go on now, how their life, his life, could ever be settled and ordinary again.

  It was out here that Hector found him.

  ‘Wha’ do you want?’ he called.

  Hector, a little way off, squatted on his heels. He plucked a grass-stalk and put it between his crooked teeth.

  ‘Well?’ Lachlan demanded. He had to fight to keep back tears.

  Hector continued to sit, his hat down over his eyes, the lip showing clear under his pale moustache.

  He knew what Hector was doing. He had decided to sit, saying nothing, since there was nothing words could say, and wear him down. And it happened. The hostility he felt melted in him, and after a little, still without speaking, Hector got to his feet and walked away.

  With Gemmy’s removal to a distance a kind of normality did come back to them in a pretence on all sides that what had occurred was a misunderstanding and no harm done.

  His aunt, always a realist, went along with it. When her neighbours turned up, full of high spirits, to gossip or bring recipes or ask for help with a bit of sewing, she welcomed them, frostily at first, and never quite in the old way; she had a kind of reserve now that would never leave her. They knew it and took her as she was.

  Things were not so easy for his uncle. Lachlan saw this because he too felt it. Something had been destroyed in him that could not be put right. He watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone. He was watchful now. There was always a little niggling worm of denial in him, a need to seek out, even in the straightest of men, some hint of crookedness that might be the truth even they did not know. He was quieter these days. He had moved away into a distance in himself that even Lachlan felt he could not presume on, and what he experienced there began to engrave itself in lines upon him, though he too kept up the pretence that life, in something like the old form, had resumed and would go on.

  Lachlan did not believe it. He was still at the stage where everything presented itself in the absolute, as a possibility to be carried blithely into the future or done with, once and for all. When he was forced to qualify, as with Hector, he felt uneasy. He was so changeable himself he wanted the world, even in the bitter form in which he now saw it, to be fixed. So when he went to visit Gemmy at Mrs Hutchence’s, a little shamefaced at having left it so long, he was surprised to walk in on a noisy company whose existence he had had no conception of, though Janet, and Meg too, had tried to tell him of it. And here they were, all, seated at a table among teacups and crumbs – Janet, Meg, Gemmy, Hector, even the schoolmaster – with Leona pouring tea out of a blue pot. They turned to face him, looking up out of the same mid-sentence, whose unfinished hilarity hung in the air, and he saw with a pang that in all these last weeks, which had been such misery to him, they had been happily settled, even Hector, in this lighted corner of the world.

  They made a place for him. Leona introduced herself, and gave him tea. There was a little cake too, with raisins in it, which crumbled in his hand when he bit into it. He looked up, very self-conscious, to see if it mattered, but it appeared not to, and he added to the scatter of crumbs.

  Just the same, he felt awkward. They went back to their lively chatter, which was all half-joking banter that the others seemed practised in and which he did not know how to enter; all its terms were unfamiliar to him. He sat glum and silent and only Gemmy, he thought, amid so much jollity, moved in the same dark strand with him.

  But he felt displeased with himself. There was, he saw, some other lighter way of responding to things. These others had found it. What was wrong with him that he could not?

  He kept an eye on Hector. He had expected the older boy might be abashed at being caught like this in the company of women, and girls – not to speak of the schoolmaster. He kept waiting for Hector to tip him off, with a wink, that his part in it was a kind of foolery. But Hector was the noisiest among them. Didn’t he know what a clown he was making of himself, with his slick hair and his empty gallantries, or that Leona, to whom they were addressed, made fun of them and was too old for him? He blushed for his friend. Only slowly did it occur to him that some of Hector’s showing off was for his benefit; he was expected to be impressed.

  What puzzled him most was the presence of the schoolmaster, who said very little. Was he embarrassed at being discovered here, as Hector might have been and was not? But after a little he saw that Mr Abbot too was included in Leona’s teasing, and did not mind it any more than Hector did, and that Hector’s sallies, in a joking way that suggested an understanding between them, were meant to be measured against what Mr Abbot could produce.

  He produced very little. It was Hector who set the pace – Lachlan was astonished, where had he learned all this? – and was the more unconstrained, the more skilled too, at answering Leona back and provoking and pleasing her.

  She tried the game, briefly, with him. She had a different tone for each of them, and he thought he detected in the one she chose for him a degree of mockery – for his youth, was it? – that brought a flush of indignation to his cheek. She saw it and drew back, but when he was ignored he took offence. She saw that too, but did not know how to help him.

  And Janet?

  In the
se last months they had grown apart. He was already aware of a change in her, but it was now, in this company, that he saw how great it might be. He had taken for granted always that their lives were intertwined, by which he meant that her chief concern must be him. She did nothing to deny it, but was absorbed, he saw, in a world of her own that he had no part in. He caught looks between her and his aunt that had not been there before, and when he burst in upon them once, with his usual expectation of welcome, was surprised by the faces they turned to him, which were attentive but subtly closed.

  It had struck him then, and for the first time, that there might be areas of experience that he was not intended to enter. That closed look marked only the closest and most gently guarded of them. Beyond lay others that had never heard of him and never would hear.

  He was shaken. In the revelation that a power he had taken for granted in himself might have limitations, he felt much of it fall away.

  Meanwhile, here at the table, Janet met his eyes and flushed with embarrassment. Not surely for him!

  He found an excuse to get away, though Leona protested. Gemmy went with him, and they walked a little way on the road together. They barely spoke. Gemmy was sick. He too felt sick at heart. He promised to return but knew that he would not, and Gemmy knew it too. They stood a moment, then he turned and moved away.

  He looked back once and saw that Gemmy too had turned, about sixty yards off, and they faced one another down the white ribbon of track. They were too far off to be more to one another than figures whose eyes, whose real dimensions even, were lost to distance.

  For years afterwards he would have dreams in which he would stand trying, against the fact of distance, to see the look on Gemmy’s face, and once or twice, in his dream, he walked back through the white dust, which rose in ghostly spirals around him, and went right up to where he was standing, and looked into his face. But it remained as blurred as it had been from sixty yards off, and he woke with his cheeks wet, even after so long, though he was no longer a child.

  18

  AFTER THREE YEARS in the north, Mr Frazer was delighted with Brisbane. The service at Marr’s Boarding House was cheerful, the jug and basin on the washstand a wonderful guarantee of the amenities, clear water, steaming hot in the mornings, and the soup at the table d’hôte agreeably thick.

  The little town was very little, not much more really than a village, and this surprised him considering the almost mystical importance they attached to it ‘up there’, but impressive monuments were in sight. They were shadowy as yet behind scaffolding, but one or two of them had stepped clear and stood broad-fronted and substantial above the verandahed hotels and weatherboard bank buildings and stores, the picket fences, and rutted, rather twisty lanes where, on his morning walk to the top of a wooded ridge, he met barefooted youths driving cows.

  The Governor, he soon discovered, was a very visible figure. He dashed about the unpaved streets in a gleaming chariot, wearing epaulettes and a sword, and gave the impression, with his ramrod stance and lean profile, of being the embodiment of a distant, almost unapproachable power. But when Mr Frazer presented himself at Government House, it was Sir George himself who looked out of a window and called him in.

  It was as if he had arrived at a rundown country mansion, Palladian in style but with household arrangements that appeared to be Irish, or perhaps the climate had something to do with it; the day was sultry. Toys and flowers with their heads off lay scattered about the entrance hall, which otherwise was very empty – a child’s hobbyhorse, several wooden animals. There were scurryings in side rooms and a woman’s voice raised in complaint.

  Sir George came out and seemed irritated by the commotion. Ignoring Mr Frazer and the startled footman, he flung open a door, stood glaring, and the scufflings ceased; but his face, when he turned, remained peevish, and Mr Frazer had the impression, a flash, no more, not of a naval man retired early but of a dignified upper servant who had been caught in his master’s clothes and was convinced, if he was overbearing enough, that he would get away with it. ‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, with sudden affability, ‘do come in. I’m delighted.’

  The interview that followed was a puzzle to Mr Frazer. He felt that he had never quite got the hang of it, or of Sir George either.

  Sir George, having recovered his poise, appeared a fine, bluff fellow, not so old as you might have thought, and not at all stiff; he invited you to be entirely open with him. But Mr Frazer was disconcerted, just the same, by the line of questioning he took. He had written earlier, no doubt, to Mr Herbert – it was Mr Herbert who had set him on to make this report? No? Then it was one or other of the people up there (the Governor pushed about a pile of papers he had before him and seemed more and more put out) whom of course he had complete knowledge of – Mr McIntosh, perhaps, one of the O’Hares? It occurred to Mr Frazer after a moment that he was suspected of being an emissary, a secret one, though Sir George had nosed him out, of forces that Sir George was at war with, and who were always, by one means or another, trying to get under his guard. Sir George fixed him with a hurt look, accusatory blue. Am I right sir? Have I found you out?

  Not at all, he insisted. He had come here entirely in his own right, on behalf – very briefly, though he feared not briefly enough, he tried to describe Gemmy, who was not very easily describable; how the man, through his knowledge of native life, had led him etc … It was enough anyway to satisfy Sir George that he was not one of a cabal, yet another subverter of the great design, and that his report was not part of a plan to entrap and discredit him.

  But once the report was rendered harmless Sir George lost interest in it, and in Gemmy too. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘an interesting case – they are interesting people –’ but a moment later they had leapt to Hesiod and arrived, before Mr Frazer had quite caught up, at Homer, a frequent destination, he guessed, in Sir George’s conversational flights.

  Sir George’s commission here is to call into existence a new self-governing state; in a land, territory rather, about the size of France and all the Germanies combined, wild, cut in two by the southern tropic, and largely, as yet, unpeopled. He is alternately intoxicated by the largeness of the undertaking and depressed that in being set down, at more than forty, at the ends of the earth, he may drop from sight. To keep his name before the Lords in Westminster he writes to one or another of them almost daily, describing in grandiloquent terms, all classical allusion and analogy, the names he has bestowed on a nameless part of the empire, the towns he has founded, the laws laid down. He sees himself as a kind of imperial demiurge, out of mere rocks and air creating spaces where history may now occur – at once the Hesiod of the place, its Solon, and its antipodean Pericles.

  The archaic and the classical, indeed the prehistoric and the classical, exist side by side here and in the same moment. Sir George finds it entirely understandable that in the little coastal port he has honoured with his name a crocodile has been seen to emerge from the mud and waddle unperturbed about the main street, and that in his capital of a mere five thousand souls the monuments he is building, dome and portico, rise in incongruous glory above the backs of bullock teams, the curses of their drivers, and under the gaze of creatures, only recently redeemed from nakedness, whose minds are still sunk in unfathomable night.

  They are in the age of wonders here, where forms, nameless as yet, are just beginning to emerge out of the dark, the dreamlike: the age of the hippogriff and demogorgon, of the heroes and demigods, too, of future legend, who just happen to have names like Jones and Dalrymple, and wear moleskins, or, as he does, the uniform of Her Majesty’s Colonial Service. ‘Your town,’ he writes to his patron, Lord Cardwell, of the little mosquito-infested port in the north on which he has settled that great man’s name, ‘lies in a position analogous to that of Thermopylae; that is, at the north end of the Australian Epirus’. In his mind, as it soars and hangs eagle-like over the great expanse of past and future, the local squattocracy, rough fellows most of them, ar
e his squatter kings. ‘Runs (the colonial term for a wide-ranging pasture)’ he informs one of his Lordships, ‘seems a literal translation of of Homer, where the shepherd kings feed their cattle in a similar climate to that of Arcadia. How refreshing among my daily cares are these classical analogies.’ Being escorted into a little western town of nine pubs and a butcher shop, by a party of two hundred stockmen, he sees himself riding in the company of attendant centaurs. Analogy is his drug. He finds it everywhere.

  At eighteen he fell in love with the Mediterranean. Twenty years later he married into it. Lady Bowen, Roma Diamantina, is the daughter of the President of the Senate of Corfu, the Count Candiano di Roma.

  Queensland, one has to say, was not Sir George’s first choice, but he is determined to make the most of it. He refuses to be put off by its failure at times to come up to the mark. His own mind knows no bounds. He is monstrously ambitious. What he fears is that if he is too successful here he will be taken for granted and overlooked; but there are occasions when he fears even more that he may be exposed, since the secret that gnaws his soul, child as he is of a Donegal rectory, is that he is an imposter.

  Sir George, easy now, reaches behind him and slips from a shelf two little volumes of which he is himself the very modest author. Mr Frazer is impressed.

  One is an argument in favour of the present island of Ithaca as the site of Homer’s island; the other an account of a journey on horseback, across Thessaly and the High Pindus, from Constantinople to Corfu. Sir George, it appears, has stood at the summit of all three classical peaks, Etna, Parnassus, Mount Olympus – a feat no other Briton has emulated. But when he opens the atlas he has recently commissioned, and they look together at the town there that bears Sir George’s name, Mr Frazer, remembering the scattered huts along the shore and the listless air about the jetty he sailed from, for he knows the actual place, feels his confidence in the Governor take a downward turn. A kind of gloom comes over him. Sir George, he decides, exudes an air of magnificent unreality that includes everything he looks upon. He has got close enough to feel its disintegrating effect in every part of him.