by Tom Keneally
‘Oh,’ I said, sympathetically, ‘you must understand that my father would rather write of men being saved by the colonies.’
They accepted this and became thoughtful.
Though Norwich offered me a meal and room, I excused myself and headed out to my damper, mutton and swag, for I favoured that itinerant bed better than an uncertain bed in a colonial coaching inn. I said to Cultay, who had tea bubbling over the fire, ‘Cultay, I hope it is the right thing, but Mr Norwich suggested that given it is Christmas I buy you some port wine. And so, thank you for being my companion! I feel safer with you. The port is a small tribute.’
By firelight, the ageless Cultay’s profoundly set eyes weighed me though he did not reach out from his kneeling position by the fire. I put the bottle by his knee and he said, ‘Thanks, Mr Dickens,’ and moved the sherry to his side of the fire. We ate dinner and he had not touched the bottle before I washed in the creek and was ready for bed. Before I settled into my swag Cultay held out a wad of gum to me and said, ‘Mr Dickens, you bite on that one and you get good dreaming.’
‘Really?’ I stupidly asked.
‘You need a good dreaming from that feller there.’ Objects were often referred to as ‘fellers’ by the natives, as if everything had a soul. Ever polite, I took the wad of brown gum.
I was suddenly overtaken by a pulse of deep melancholy which perhaps Cultay had seen coming. Gaggin seemed such a sad creature, even in his fruitless knowledge of my father’s writing. But I said, ‘I’m tired anyhow. I might save it for another night when I need it.’
‘Keep him by you,’ Cultay urged. ‘He’s a good one. You travel easy with that feller. With him in you, you see the dead and they talk to you like mates.’
I must have looked stricken by the waning firelight for Cultay chortled and said, ‘You see your missus before you meet her. You make friends with all the people in the dream place. You come back happy then.’
‘All right,’ I said, raising the wad of gum to prove it was on my agenda. ‘I’ll certainly be into it if I have trouble sleeping.’
He nodded and then sang to himself in a monotone and I went very shortly to sleep.
It cannot have been late in the night when I woke in a fright, thinking an owl, or a frogmouth, had been climbing on my face, eying me. I was sure I could taste feathers in my mouth but the taste vanished as I became conscious and was replaced by a leaden weight of wakefulness. I thought of Alfred and felt dread. Why, I did not know, but it was as if I had risen from my mother’s breast a blood-red hateful thing and could not be reconciled to the toil of becoming child and man, and that seeing Alfred turned me as a child to greater unappeased anger still. I was going to my brother for the sake of Christmas, for love’s sake, and yet I felt I was approaching a well of venom, or taking my own poison to it, and not embarking in any way on an amiable exercise of fraternity.
‘. . . if I have trouble sleeping,’ I had said of the gum to Cultay, whose breathing and snuffling indicated he was asleep.
I took a segment of the mix of gum and ash, which had a heavy vegetable sweetness. As I chewed it, all the malice bled out of me and the hell in my head ebbed away. I felt an immense relief, for the alignment of all stars and all impulses was reversed, and the vast and star-crammed night grew kindly. This ‘feller’ is a greater cure than port! I thought.
I started to have visions of being in some grand room playing a violin very fluently with Constance Desailly at her own instrument, a cello or some such, by my side. Over the music I said to her, ‘I never knew that I desired you. I thought you were a very ordinary girl.’ Connie found this amusing but it did not make her pause in her music.
After that I saw Soldier Staples standing at the crease of the cricket pitch in Netallie Station with a cricket ball in his hand and his bloody side bleeding lustrously away over his red Momba XI sash. Mr Fremmel was at the far batting crease, a man in despair, a condition to which our music had reduced him.
My mother then appeared at the fielding position of mid-off and she was as amused as Constance, the way women are in a conspiracy of amusement about men. Mama took Staples by the hands and he dropped the ball and adjusted his arms to her plump body, saying, ‘Mind your dress, Mrs Dickens.’
‘I’ll send it off to those actresses,’ my mother trilled like a girl.
Constance and I were almost disappearing, united in one long curlicue of sound. ‘What a pity you don’t know shorthand,’ Constance murmured. She seemed to think it would be necessary so that we could communicate further.
‘I’ll learn,’ I promised her.
From his batting crease the viperous Mr Fremmel called out, ‘No one is bowling to me!’ For some reason this was the most hilarious thing I had ever heard and I bubbled with laughter down the skeins of music.
There was more, but it lacked the sharpness of the dream to that point. I know I was looking for signs of some sort in Constance’s face. When I woke I was in the usual condition of boys my age. Yet though back in a kinder universe, I thought even then a little contemptuously of my dream self, who had been striving to achieve a single song with Constance Desailly and share her shorthand.
Against any further demons of night, I wrapped the remaining gum in paper and pocketed it.
‘Christmas Eve, Cultay,’ I cried when I woke at dawn.
By the time we set off it was already fiercely hot and as we rode the sun lay on our shoulders like a weight. But we withdrew into ourselves and focused on the thought that we would reach Corona by dusk.
21
The village of Corona Station was not as large as Momba, but from the ridge above it looked prettily placed in a valley cut by a creek. The buildings were made of stones from the hills that seemed to bespeak quartz and, according to some, the possibility of silver. There was a well with a rise of sandstone behind it. As we approached, Paakantji children ran out from brush shelters by the creek to greet us, and two old men stepped up in shirts and canvas pants to stare at us. If they were relatives of Cultay, they gave no sign of greeting. A number of young drovers were building a bonfire in the dust of the home pasture. I could tell which of them came from a British city (London, Liverpool, Birmingham) to learn to be a squatter because I wore the same British-bought rig myself when I was working.
I saw Alfred emerge from the shadow of the store veranda. I called ‘Happy Christmas’ to Cultay as he was escorted away by a crowd of his relatives, including shrilling women and reserved old men.
As soon as I dismounted Alfred was beside me, crying, ‘Happy Christmas, little brother.’ As he embraced me by the shoulders, I smelled some warm spirit on his breath, possibly brandy. He had, I knew from old days, quite a taste for the hard stuff.
‘My good Mr Tom Chard, the storekeeper here, has been celebrating with me, knowing how easy it is to lead me astray on the eve of the birth of the Christ child. And when my brother is about to join me too!’ Alfred said blithely with simple affection.
The storekeeper emerged from the shadows and stood a little way off, grinning amiably.
‘Mr Chard, Mr Dickens, and the same in reverse,’ said Alfred. ‘You are becoming such a bush traveller, Plorn. I should let you know,’ he went on, ‘that there’s a bonfire tonight. In the colonies we celebrate great heat by lighting bonfires. It’s the only way to let God know we’re still here.’
‘You’re getting deuced theological, Dickens,’ said Tom Chard, not unpleasantly.
‘It must be the season,’ said Alfred. ‘The mercury boils in the thermometer, so it must be Christmas in the colonies!’ Then he whistled in his sporty, touty way – he had always been a jaunty person. And for all his scholarly disasters, his chin remained high and he kept that indomitable, cocky sparrow curve in his back.
‘You brought that black man with you, though. That Cultay fellow?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I must speak to him. We have a few problems at Morphett’s Creek. Thank the Bonneys for sending him.’
I
hadn’t been aware until then that Cultay’s visit had a meaning for Alfred. At Alfred’s whistle, a young Aboriginal boy stopped running with his friends and came over to us.
My brother told him to take my saddle bags inside to Mrs Geraghty and put them in my room, and then unsaddle and water my mare.
I pardoned myself and followed the boy through the scraggly front garden to the homestead, already trying to think of excuses to get out of too late a night of festivity, for in my brother’s posture, his curved back and his tidy set shoulders, I could see somehow, from seeing it in childhood, the intention to be festive. The boy led me into the homestead via a deep, low-roofed veranda and we passed through a wet hessian curtain in the doorway and went into the dark coolness of the house.
We found Mrs Geraghty sweeping in the back of the house. She was a strong-bodied woman, not very old, but very brown and gypsy-looking. She wore a long yellow dress on her full figure and boots on her feet without stockings.
As always with strangers, I felt the old rustiness and uncertainty. ‘I am Mr Dickens’ brother,’ I said, smiling hesitantly.
‘Now I would say you would want some tea,’ she replied in a colonial accent.
I told her that would be very pleasant.
‘Would you like it in the living room or in the kitchen?’ she asked.
‘The kitchen, please, Mrs Geraghty,’ I replied, for I had a sudden yearning for the company of a woman of mothering proportions.
‘All square, Mr Dickens,’ she told me. ‘I’ll get it ready. You just come along.’
I was shown into the house and to my room, which was dark under a low-slung timber roof with big eaves, and had for decoration only a report of a South Australian steeple-chaser hammered by an enthusiast to the wall under the ornate pressed-tin ceiling.
After washing from a pitcher and basin, I put on a new shirt, and went out through the back of the house to the kitchen, which was a separate structure like we had at Momba.
Mrs Geraghty had set up a little table with tea in a pot, a china cup and a segment of tart covered by a doily. I was about to pour my tea when she came out, wiping her hands on a cloth, and demanding to perform the duty herself. She said as she poured, ‘It is a pleasure, of course, to be pouring for another son of . . .’
I presumed she’d refer to the guvnor but instead she said, ‘. . . the great prophet of the kitchen and dining room, Lady Maria Clutterbuck.’
I was confused for a moment, before I remembered the worn cooking manual Mama had written, which I’d seen Aunt Georgie occasionally peer into with the frown of a woman looking for an answer.
‘That is, I believe,’ said Mrs Geraghty, ‘the nom de plume of your own mother, Mrs Dickens.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘She wrote What Shall We Have For Dinner? when she was young, I think, before I was even born. ‘It was said to be by a Lady Maria Clutterbuck. But that was my mother. It was really my mother herself.’
‘Yes, as I told you,’ said Mrs Geraghty.
‘And I think the guvnor, my father, wrote something at the start of it.’
‘How happy they must’ve been working, husband and wife, to make an entire book of recipes.’
‘Yes, they were very happy,’ I asserted.
But how did I know? I was not born. Was it Dora’s loss that had made them unhappy? So sudden. The guvnor had played with her all afternoon, carrying her round the garden. And then she underwent a sudden baby seizure and died while he was giving a lecture. Aunt Georgie said that when the guvnor got home, he held the little corpse all night in his arms.
I decided to take a bet on Mrs Geraghty, who carried whatever reading she had done without pretention, asking her, ‘Have you read much of my father’s work?’
She weighed the question, then said, ‘I read a little bit of Pickwick Papers once. But it wasn’t very useful.’
I burst into laughter, feeling my burden of illiteracy relieved.
Mrs Geraghty frowned. ‘Did I say something amusing, Mr Dickens?’
‘No. I was thinking how flattered my mother would be.’
‘I used her recipes time and time again while I lived in Tasmania, since we could get fresh fish there. Now your father’s favourite, I believe, roast leg of mutton stuffed with oysters . . . I could do that with stewed kidneys as well, when I was working for a lady on the eastern coast of the place. But as for roast mutton here, I stuff it with a sauce-laden mince, which seems to suit your brother’s taste. I make sausages as well, using a sausage-making machine the pastoral company set up for me.’
I nodded politely, and she continued enthusiastically. ‘When it comes to poultry, we don’t have it so badly here. I can generally send a boy out to bring in a few ducks. Now you can’t find anyone in the bush to speak up for the humble brush turkey, but I catch them myself and serve them as fillets or in curry. I use your mother’s pheasant recipe on them, too. As for beef and lamb, cutlets and saddles and sweetbread and legs, all of which Lady Clutterbuck recommends, you might have noticed we have no shortage.’
‘We have no shortage at Momba either. What we sadly lack is a cook like you.’
Under her tan Mrs Geraghty went red at this flattery. Mind you, I thought, our cook at Momba, the old fellow named Courtney, was not so bad at all.
‘Now that tart there, on your plate, that is the desert fruit named quandong. I use it in your mama’s recipe for greengage tart. Taste that quandong while I watch.’
I did and it was delightful. Seeing my expression, she said, ‘Now your brother, he said to me the first time he had that, “Mrs Geraghty,” he said, “that there quandong is a revelation.”’
‘I say it too,’ I told her, eating another mouthful. ‘Do you have a copy of the book there? The cookbook, I mean.’
‘Of course! I was given it in bound form by Mrs Hare when my boy and I decided we must come to the mainland for the opportunities. The boy’s about your age now and a fine son, who works as a drover at Poolamacca Station,’ she told me with a proud smile.
‘Your Mrs Hare must’ve been sad to see you go.’
‘Oh, I trained a girl up,’ said Mrs Geraghty. ‘To fill my place.’
She went inside and came back with a slim but large page-bound book which she handed to me before vanishing again. Knowing it was my mother validated in brown and red leather there, at the limits of colonial pastures, before the desert began, I started to weep, though I could not define why.
Seeing my tears when she reappeared, Mrs Geraghty took my arm and said, ‘Of course, my dear boy, you must miss your mama.’
‘I don’t know why I cried,’ I told her. ‘Don’t tell my brother.’
‘Do you think your brother has never cried?’ Mrs Geraghty replied with a laugh.
‘May I take this to my room for a while?’ I asked, wiping away my tears.
She said of course and urged me to finish my quandong tart. I needed no command, thanked her and went to my room, grateful for the moment that Alfred was settled in for a carouse. But it was not long before the boy who’d brought my bags in was knocking on the door.
‘Please, Mr Dickens, Mr Dickens says would you like to come over to him and Mr Chard there?’
‘Tell him I’m indisposed for the moment but I’ll see him in an hour,’ I replied.
‘What’s that, mister?’ asked the young Paakantji.
‘Tell him I’m a bit crook in the stomach, and I’ll be there in a while.’
‘Fair play,’ the boy told me and left.
I sat at a desk by the window and opened the much but carefully used cookbook, which was an 1852 edition. The year of my birth, that is. As women throughout the world bought the book, Mama was suckling me.
The title page declared the authorship as the fictitious Lady Maria Clutterbuck, and I knew, because Aunt Georgie had told me, that it was Father who wrote the introduction in the voice of the supposed author, Lady Clutterbuck, who was reflecting on the late but beloved Sir Jonas and his culinary taste.
The
late Sir Jonas Clutterbuck had, in addition to a host of other virtues, a very good appetite and an excellent digestion; to those endowments I was indebted (though some years the junior of my revered husband) for many hours of connubial happiness.
Sir Jonas was not a gourmand, although a man of great gastronomical experience. Richmond never saw him more than once a month, and he was as rare a visitor to Black-wall and Greenwich. Of course he attended most of the corporation dinners as a matter of duty (having been elected alderman in 1839), and now and then partook of a turtle feast at some celebrated place in the city; but these were only exceptions, his general practice being to dine at home; and I am consoled in believing that my attention to the requirements of his appetite secured me the possession of his esteem until the last.
My experience in the confidences of many of my female friends tells me, alas! that others are not so happy in their domestic relations as I was. That their daily life is embittered by the consciousness that a delicacy forgotten or misapplied, a surplusage of cold mutton or a redundancy of chops, are gradually making the Club more attractive than the Home, and rendering ‘business in the city’ of more frequent occurrence than it used to be in the earlier days of their connubial experience; while the ever-recurring inquiry of WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER? makes the matutinal meal a time to dread, only exceeded in its terrors by the more awful hour of dinner!
It is to rescue many fair friends from such domestic suffering, that I have consented to give to the world THE BILLS OF FARE which met with the approval of Sir Jonas Clutterbuck, believing that by a constant reference to them, an easy solution may be obtained to that most difficult of questions – ‘WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?’
Reading it I felt they must have still loved each other when he wrote that, passing himself off as the same person, my mother, who wrote the bills of fare. They were united in their publisher too as it turns out – Bradbury and Evans, before Father told us Fred Evans said nasty things about the separation and Aunt Georgie.
