The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  It all sounded exactly right in her unaffected mouth. Oh, it became apparent to me then, I simply loved her, vowels and all. But there was Hayward. She and Hayward were destiny’s duet. You could see it. She would stop him from being brutishly drunk and studiedly vulgar! She had arisen in a geographic locality that was a harsh place for hues and subtleties and hints. But I loved the way she said, ‘Athwart’.

  Suddenly she was on ‘In Memoriam’.

  Meanwhile, I muttered it to myself as an experiment. ‘Athwart.’ And reflected what a disaster ‘In Memoriam’ would have been on an over-pious, breathy tongue.

  ‘Did you say something?’ asked Alfred in a whisper as his godfather’s august rhythms rolled on. I bumped my fisted right hand against my lips to convey I had coughed. But ‘Athwart’ I had said in enchantment.

  ‘Awful time he had as a child,’ the guvnor had said of Uncle Alfred Tennyson. I think cocaine and lunacy were involved, and a wretched mother and a father who, though a clergyman, was as malignant as any other fellow.

  Connie continued: ‘I held it truth, with him who sings/To one clear harp in divers tones/That men may rise on stepping-stones/Of their dead selves to higher things.’

  I liked the way she then recited, ‘Let love clasp grief lest both be drowned . . .’

  I wanted to say, ‘Love clasp grief’ aloud, as I had said, ‘Athwart.’

  After Connie yielded the stage, Reverend Rutledge took it and recited Psalm 23, and then people joined a queue to express their condolences to us and, as the Reverend Rutledge had said, to console themselves by looking upon the flesh and blood of immortal Dickens, amongst those in Wilcannia more obviously than anywhere else on earth in Alfred and me.

  It was true that a genuine awe hung over the occasion. The condolences were not facile. They were, in a wonderful sense, communal.

  At last the Desaillys appeared in front of me. It was soothing to see their frowning ceremoniousness. Mrs Desailly parted her veil to deliver her feelings. Alfred Desailly was more brusque, of the school of thought that death was so enormous a beast that there was no word crafted to penetrate its hide. Connie said, ‘There are no words, Plorn, for your bereavement. If anything happens to my dad –’

  I suppressed an urge to ask her to say ‘Athwart’.

  Inevitably, in the line we needed to face the bland condolences of Mr Fremmel, who appeared soon after, very anxious to introduce himself to Alfred, whose loan had apparently been approved. There was subservience in the way Fremmel made his speech to Alfred. His oratory was started with ‘If I can ever be of any help’. And ‘Should you require any service it is within the compass of Fremmel and Company to deliver . . .’ If Fremmel came to suspect any chicanery of me, Alfred would be far away in a year or so, and unassailable.

  It also seemed obvious to us – though Alfred had a better eye for it than I did – that some of the tradespeople were looking to our inheritance. I had not until then thought of the family spoils arising from Father’s death and would have parted with the lot to buy another mortal day for the guvnor.

  Afterwards tea was served and I sought out the Desailly family again, gradually manoeuvring myself to Connie’s side, whereupon she did me the enormous honour of speaking in the plain daily bread of words, saying, ‘Why did you leave that night we were all singing?’

  ‘I thought the Desailly girls had found the right company for the evening.’

  ‘The right company? Hayward?’

  ‘He’s a very good tenor. He’s good company.’ I smiled, as if at ease. ‘I felt entitled to go off to my swag, seeing you were so well set up.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want you ever to do that again,’ she told me in a lowered voice. ‘I mean it. I might be a rough girl from the Western Division but I require things to be done properly. I do hope you understand that, Plorn. The appropriate ceremonies.’

  I said I was sorry, and she extended her hand to my forearm. I could see the lines on it from handling saddlery and reins. And though her mother went to such trouble to avoid the taint of the sun, Connie’s own hand was olive. She must have taken her complexion from her brown-domed father rather than from the cautious, veiled mother.

  I said, ‘I will be very pleased to perform the appropriate ceremonies from now on. Even though I’m not a tenor and can’t sing music hall songs.’

  She shook her head and said, ‘Out of respect for your father, I must suspend your further education until you return from Sydney.’

  I smiled. In the midst of ashes, she had made me happy, and the idea of a future series of educative contacts was joyful to me even in bereavement.

  34

  Alfred and I spent some days on the road to Sydney in a coach provided by Cobb and Co. Local newspapers announced the time of our likely passing through the towns or hamlets on the way, and if they had a church, the bell tolled our passage past the storefronts and the facades of the hotels, and the guests watched us earnestly from the upper verandas. Sometimes cheers were raised from the footpath, since, on top of the story of our family’s loss, garbled tales abounded about my saving Momba from the Starlight gang.

  Since Sir Charles Cowper, the premier of the self-governing colony of New South Wales, had summoned Alfred and me to the week of state mourning there, both of us now travelled not only under the beneficence and care of this august version of a young state – ‘Newly arisen how brightly you shine!’ said its escutcheon – but with an escort of four troopers to discourage other wandering banditti from afflicting us, since newspapers were simultaneously attributing the departure of Dr Pearson’s gang to Queensland to the dignity of the grief-inspired courage I had displayed to them.

  ‘Do you think,’ asked Alfred as we rolled through Dubbo on the fourth day, with schoolchildren, police and public officials lining the road, ‘that the guvnor knew it would be like this? Australia, I mean?’

  ‘Athwart,’ I let my mind sing as ever.

  I told him the story of how I had bought du Barry in a fit of purchasing lunacy and how, perhaps in a brief period when du Barry was amenable, or perhaps when she was notably rebellious, Dr Pearson had taken her out of admiration for her lines, possibly with a belief he could manage any horse by craft or physic. The fact that the great Pearson had stolen du Barry exempted me from my own folly and transformed the horse from a source of shame to an anecdote, which I told with flourishes to distract my brother.

  The Herald said that the guvnor’s works were being read in all schools in New South Wales, so that those who had not known him were drawn into the great worldwide ring of grievers. As we came through Nyngan, the girls and boys lined out in late light in overcoats, whose breath steamed amidst the streaky sunlight falling through giant eucalypts.

  Conversations Alfred and I had during the journey were influenced by the convention that no bad should be spoken of the dead. Certainly nothing bad had been said in any newspaper report to titillate the McGaws of the world. The Australian newspapers had mentioned that Father had considered a tour some years back and had said that he meant to write a travel book named The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down. Australia, through the voices of its citizens, seemed to mourn the fact that the great narrator of the age would now never read here, as he had in the United States. Nor would a great novel of Australia emerge from that creator. How I would have loved to have told the guvnor about Pearson and Rutherford. The bushrangers would, I think, have appealed to him as table talk, and might, perhaps, have made their way into a novel. Sometimes as I sat at the window passing through townships, being gawked at as a Dickens incarnation, I felt the fraudulence of my state intensely, that until I steeled myself to encounter the books, I was impersonating a son.

  I found I wanted increasingly to mention Father’s Irish girl to Alfred, but hesitated since it might spark undue reflections on the guvnor’s character. Something about my certainty she had been there at the death troubled me, especially given that our mother had not been there. The girl who was Father’s friend above all frie
nds. And I had my grievance that she’d seen the guvnor laid in the Thames soil beneath the Abbey.

  I felt at last it was my duty to bring up the girl. ‘By all reports, Mama wasn’t there at the end, I said.’

  ‘No,’ said Alfred. ‘He had grown utterly away from Mama. He should have realised, however, that there was no way we could grow apart from her.’

  I knew that this was nothing but fair comment. I asked, despite the risk, ‘Do you think the girl was there?’ And then having begun I could not stop. ‘Do you think she was there at the end?’

  ‘I think it’s very likely,’ said Alfred, almost matter-of-factly. ‘She is the engine who drove his past years. And that’s . . . That’s all we can say.’

  I was disarmed enough to add, ‘If she was at the Abbey . . . I wish it was me instead.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Alfred gently, graciously not taking up the bait. ‘Look, Plorn, the truth is that our parents fell out of love. And even then, not Mama. But it seems the man’s privilege to do so. Everything changed then. I have to say it: if he’d stayed with Mama he would have lived five, ten years longer. Perhaps the Irish girl is not to blame. But whether she chose to be or not, she was poison. Total poison.’

  And of course it was inevitable that in our time together we should talk about inheritance. Despite our differences on what sort of man Father was, we knew he would have left us a solid legacy. And his death, which we would not have wished for and even now didn’t truly believe, had changed our prospects – as Fremmel’s behaviour towards me had shown.

  The question of whether Father had left the girl anything proved to be part of Alfred’s musings, and many people would have said, why not? As for our own condition, when letters arrived from home we would know more. But amongst what Father, in his conscientious way, would have applied himself to was the issue of what each of us needed, of what his two daughters Mamie and Katie needed, Katie being married, Mamie a spinster. And then Aunt Georgie, who deserved the guvnor’s generosity. And then the children, Alfred and me included. And then, Mama. And last of all, whether we liked it or not, the Irish girl.

  There were also practical considerations. I was eighteen and might not be able to take control of what I had been left until I was twenty-one. Alfred, however, was twenty-five, and would have direct access to any beneficence of the guvnor. Thus Alfred’s plans to move across the Murray River and settle in Hamilton were as good as realised.

  ‘Would you care to join me in Hamilton?’ he asked suddenly at one point in the journey. ‘We could even share a residence,’ he suggested tentatively. Alfred thought it an attractive idea, the Dickens brothers living in a pleasant and verdant town with a view of mountains which some Scots settler had sentimentally named the Grampians.

  I said I was very flattered to be asked, and indeed I was. I felt pleased Alfred considered me fit to aid him in the making of his colonial fortune. But I said that I wanted to make my own mark in the pastoral industry before retiring to a friendly town somewhere. Fred Bonney was paying me a good though not sumptuous wage, but with nothing to spend it on it had accumulated wonderfully. I had to wait, I explained, until I came of age and could then take any patrimony Father had sent my way and use it in the country I so admired. I also wished among, other things, to have my camp of Paakantji or of whatever tribe. I wished to deploy my hundreds of thousands of sheep in the vastness, though someone like Connie Desailly lay in that destiny – someone who had the hands of a colonial horsewoman and could say ‘athwart’ with an unrehearsed directness.

  And, in any case, I needed to postpone all decisions about my future until after the memorial events and eulogies in Sydney.

  We left behind our ceremonial horsemen at the rail terminus to the west of the mountains. And it was there that another gentleman about Alfred’s age entered our railway coach. He was sun-tanned and had piercing eyes beneath a curled black forelock, and a full beard. ‘Alfred, Edward,’ he said solemnly, seeming to understand that he was part stranger and part visitor. ‘I too have been dragged in by the authorities to represent my father at the obsequies. Forgive me. I am Fred Trollope, Anthony’s son. Will you accept my condolences? Our family all remember your father with great fondness.’

  Yes, this man had once come for a weekend at Gad’s Hill as a boy. And the guvnor sometimes mentioned that he’d seen Anthony Trollope at the Garrick or Athenaeum clubs. But he and Fred’s father had never been close friends because he was too much of a Tory masquerading as a liberal for the guvnor. He’d actually stood for parliament as a Liberal, and the guvnor had sworn frequently and bitterly to my godfather and others that he himself would rather go to hell than try for a seat in the Commons.

  Fred Trollope sat down in apologetic mode on my side of the railway compartment, facing Alfred. As they exchanged pleasantries I noticed that Alfred was a little restrained in his welcome, calling Trollope ‘old man’ in a way I could tell from growing up with him was not sincere. I asked Fred how far he’d travelled to join us and he replied that he’d ridden from his station near Forbes, which was called Mortray, to the rail terminus. He went to some trouble to tell us that he’d tried to plead he was too busy with work at his station to come to Sydney, mainly because he thought it was a bit simple-minded of the colonial government to lump together other novelists’ sons with the Dickens boys. But Sir Charles Cowper had insisted it would be a salutary and exemplary thing, and he had given in. ‘I hope you chaps don’t mind,’ he told us frequently.

  Our train brought us through mighty hills to the great sandstone bastions on the inland side of the Blue Mountains. The bush above the rail track was full of points of snow.

  Fred asked me about my time as a hostage of the bushrangers, making it clear that the episode had grown into a three-act drama in the popular mind. In some versions I had nonplussed Pearson and Rutherford by pure artifice and valour, routing them in Momba by a form of Dickens bushranger-outwitting genius.

  I asked him about his station, which he was very willing to talk about. He told me some of it was mountain country, from which a number of good streams descended. The highest point of the mountains was called the Pinnacle, which attracted gold prospectors. Abounding either side of his up-country fences were families of former Irish convicts with very loose attitudes to stealing livestock, damaging fences out of spite, as if he were a tyrannous landlord in another country and not a fellow toiler. Along one of the creeks in the lower land on its northern side a speculator had selected 680 acres under the Selection Act and was waiting there for Fred to buy him out again. But it was obvious that, like us, he loved the prospects and freedoms of the business, despite its demands – the troubles of selectors, the hill-sheltering Irish; its prospects and freedoms, and the fact you did not need Greek grammar to negotiate it.

  After a time he excused himself, probably to go for a reflective smoke at the end of the carriage, and to use the convenience.

  ‘You do not warm to him,’ I observed to Alfred.

  ‘He would have been right to refuse the premier’s invitation. He should have gone on doing so. His father is fat and well in Britain and ours is under the floor of the Abbey.’

  ‘I do think he was caught coming and going, and didn’t know what to do,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Besides that, his father made a parody of the guvnor.’

  ‘But not Fred.’

  ‘Not Fred,’ he conceded, a little short with me. ‘His bloody father did, though.’

  ‘When did that happen?’ I asked.

  ‘In some novel or other. Of the old man, old Trollope. The Warden, I think. He called the guvnor Mr Popular Sentiment.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said, turning myself a little against Fred Trollope.

  ‘The guvnor laughed at it,’ Alfred insisted, having become my father’s champion. ‘But the guvnor is dead and the mocker is still alive. And, I would say, an inferior novelist by comparison.’

  ‘But do you think the guvnor would want us to embarrass his son? He’s cl
early not his father. He lives the same life as us.’

  Alfred took a flask out of his pocket, consumed a mouthful of spirits, then shook it in my direction, inviting me to partake as well, though I refused, and he put it away.

  ‘Still,’ said Alfred, unreconciled. ‘Mr Popular Sentiment.’

  When Fred Trollope returned, I smiled a welcome at him. After that, there was a long silence as we looked out the windows as shacks and then terraced houses began to appear – the suburbs of Sydney. Some fine, tall houses in Burwood and Petersham stood as the country estates of the grand folk of Sydney, which we approached through the factories and squalor of Redfern. As we got down at the station, feeling numb and uncertain, a militia band began to play the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul, unleashing my grief. I wept as rarely I had since the news of our father’s death. As Alfred laid a hand on my shoulder and fraternally guided me along, I noticed poor Fred Trollope looked more chastened and doubtful than ever.

  35

  We had rooms at the Australia Hotel, and were invited to dine there after our days of travel. I felt bound to ask Fred to join us, and was relieved when, after a few whiskies, Alfred seemed content to accept him as not a bad fellow who was trying to fit in, and who in any case had none of his father’s pretensions. The chef also cheered us up by telling us he had cooked leg of mutton stuffed with oysters, knowing it was our late father’s favourite dish.

  A waiter made us a wonderful punch in Father’s style, and we sat into the night drinking it by the cup and discussing pastoral matters. The brotherhood of the bush, after all, united us. Fred asked us whether we thought it might be worth his while to take his cattle and sheep westwards for sale in the South Australian settlement of Adelaide.