The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘I’ll be pleased to be home,’ Alfred confided to me.

  When we got back to shore, the premier bade us farewell and a carriage took us to the Pioneers’ Club, where we made desultory plans to meet in the bar before dinner. As I was about to follow the other two upstairs, a page came up to me, passing me a card and saying, ‘This gentleman asked would you kindly meet him outside?’

  On the card a name was inked. ‘Maurice McArden’.

  ‘Where?’ I called to the page, who said, ‘Outside, sir, on the street.’

  As soon as I went out and saw Maurice, I could see why he hadn’t wanted to come inside. He wore a battered-looking Eton cap, his shirt collar was open and he looked stark around the eyes. There were cuts on his cheeks and jawline from imprecise shaving. But he also retained an air of earnestness and purpose.

  As I walked up to him he said, ‘Forgive me for intruding, Plorn, but I read in the Herald that you are visiting the city. I hope you’ll accept my sympathies along with all the rest.’

  ‘Of course I will, old fellow, and happy to have them. But how are you? And what has happened to Mrs Fremmel?’

  ‘We don’t use those names,’ he told me with a small smile. ‘I have honoured your father by calling ourselves the Rokesmiths.’

  I guessed this was the name of one of the guvnor’s notable characters.

  ‘The Rokesmiths have the struggle at the moment that Mrs Rokesmith is far from well, I fear,’ he said.

  I expressed my regrets.

  ‘I trusted, you see,’ he told me, ‘that a man like you, a man of your lineage, was someone I could safely declare myself to. So I wanted to see you. It was a powerful impulse. I’m sure when we fled Wilcannia everyone said it would not be long before Mrs Rokesmith would be back, or before I left her. I wanted someone to know that this is not the case, that I am devoted to her still.’ A thought arose in him. ‘If you had a moment, I could take you to see her.’

  Of course, I said I was amenable to seeing the good lady again. It was a carelessly uttered sentiment but Maurice took up the possibility feverishly, as if my seeing her under his devotion and care would be a sort of vindication of their escape.

  ‘I could take you very quickly and have you back, Plorn. It’s a short ride by omnibus.’

  I felt I was obligated to visit Maurice and his French aunt, so it must be now. I had my education in the lineaments of desire to which Maurice had introduced me in his not quite crazy essay. What happened, though, when the lineaments sickened? I had of course seen wives with sickly husbands, husbands with sickly wives. And now it was to be Maurice and his sick aunt.

  ‘I must be back within an hour,’ I warned him. ‘And I must excuse myself from my brother and Mr Trollope. Give me a few seconds, please, Maurice.’

  He granted that with a new vigour and a wintry smile. I went back into the club and found Alfred by the bar with a whisky. I said, ‘Would you and Fred excuse me one more time?’

  Alfred frowned. ‘A man deserves his secrets, Plorn, but this is getting ridiculous.’

  ‘Can you keep a secret, Alfred? A serious one.’

  He began to smile. ‘What is the name of this secret? Is it the dark-eyed tart from last night’s dinner?’

  ‘Don’t talk that way,’ I demanded with a sudden sternness. ‘It’s Maurice McArden – Fremmel’s nephew who ran off.’

  ‘With Fremmel’s wife, I believe.’

  ‘This is an absolute word-of-honour secret, Alfred. He wants to see me. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Fremmel is not a good enemy to make,’ Alfred murmured.

  ‘He’ll only know if you tell him.’

  So I left Alfred with an undertaking to be back in time for dinner and went out into the street, where Maurice led me to a corner, telling me that I was very good to do this. We got onto a two-storey omnibus just like the London ones, with an outside staircase to the top compartment. After paying the conductor, we continued through the city, whose multitudes milled at street corners and darted onto the roadway just like city folk anywhere. After five minutes or so we entered a street named, perhaps for the sake of familiarity and solace, Oxford Street. The fronts of shops were continuous a while, and then gave way to mean wooden and brick buildings which seemed older in their poverty than the city was. We got off near a public house named for the three weeds of Britain, the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle. As we went down a laneway by the pub, Maurice said cheerfully, ‘This is a hill, you see, Plorn. The drainage is good here.’

  He took me into a square building with two storeys and an attic. ‘There is no danger from her to you,’ he assured me in a solemn voice as we climbed the first two sets of stairs. ‘In many ways you will find her condition very sad. But it is my uncle’s fault, as you know. He initiated the disease.’

  I entered one of the two attic rooms. ‘Tu, Maurice?’ cried Mrs Fremmel, staring at us from a dowdy but comfortable-looking seat of Turkish upholstery. There was indeed a strong medicinal smell in the room, camphor predominating. Mrs Fremmel or Rokesmith was straining in her chair to turn.

  ‘I have a guest,’ Maurice boasted, and motioned me forward so that we faced her.

  She was veiled like Mrs Desailly in sunlight. ‘Oh my God, it is the son of Dickens! I am a sad picture, Mr Dickens,’ she told me. ‘Maurice told me you were in the city for the memorial services. I am so distressed for you and your father, young man.’

  I thanked her, and then, seeming a little fevered, she told me there were nuns who ran a hospice for people like her, not far from there. ‘I have told Maurice to drop me there and be free. This is a disease passed between one human and another either in ignorance or treachery. In my opinion, no one but the sufferer should be forced to attend to it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mariepier,’ said Maurice then turned to me and explained, ‘She is a model of patience. I have a job as a messenger for the Department of Lands. She sits here all day reading . . .’

  At the mention of reading, Mrs Fremmel said, ‘Your dear, dear father. The name we carry now, Mr Plorn, is intended to honour him.’

  Maurice lit a lantern on the table. Beyond her veils I saw something like a grid or a rash across her face. At first it looked like a visual delusion, but then I noticed a few red pustules. I did not want to see any more than this, and mercifully could not possibly see more anyhow.

  ‘The work of the monster,’ said Maurice.

  ‘But Mr Fremmel doesn’t appear to have any visible illness,’ I protested.

  ‘He has had it all along,’ said Maurice, ‘and Mariepier has caught it. But it has gone dormant in him, and may remain that way for ages.’

  ‘Mon dieu!’ murmured Mariepier, justifiably enough. ‘Imagine it!’

  ‘I am with you, Mrs Rokesmith,’ Maurice reassured her, smiling through his razor scars. Then to me he said, ‘The devil genuinely has looked after his own son in the case of Uncle Amos. Meanwhile, the mercury treatment causes Mariepier great anxiety and pain. But if everything goes well, it may become dormant in her as it has in the fiend himself and life will be normal.’

  ‘Normal?’ I asked.

  ‘As close as we can get.’

  And yet the lineaments of desire to whose existence Maurice had alerted me were diseased in her. Perhaps in him. He had made such a fuss about all that, and now must give it up to become an attendant, a doser and an anointer. I wanted to understand how he had made that journey, from longing to a sort of brotherly love. But he seemed so happy to be with Mariepier that I could not question him about it.

  It was soon time to return to Alfred and our final Sydney dinner. Maurice shook my hand thoroughly and thanked me. I took him aside and said, trying to imitate a sage dispassion, ‘Don’t be offended, old chap. But do you need money?’

  He was offended. ‘Do you think I tracked you down for that?’ he challenged.

  ‘No, no. But . . .’ I gestured towards Mrs Fremmel, implying her case must be a drain on him and that a friend might help.

 
‘The Sisters of Charity at St Vincent’s Hospital take excellent care of our needs,’ he told me. Then he lowered his voice. ‘It is handsome of you to offer, Plorn, and I should have foreseen your generosity. But as I said, I am working. And perhaps I can write. I have a suspicion though that my sensibility might better suit French than English publishers. English publishers are like English diners, they like meat and potatoes.’ There was a pause. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t mean of course your . . .’

  I laughed. ‘I know,’ I assured him. ‘I know.’

  ‘He, in death as in life, is the exception to all rules.’

  So I said goodnight to him and to Mrs Fremmel, who had set her sights on the view from the window and sounded distracted. I felt ashamed how grateful I was to leave Maurice and his stricken aunt and return to the meat and potatoes of Oxford Street, where I hailed a hackney.

  The next day the train that would take us home was to leave at noon, away from the city of the most succulent Mrs Wivenhoe. But the bookstores of the town, we had noticed, were displaying and seemed to be selling only the guvnor’s work, so I went to one in Pitt Street and began looking for editions of what Frank had recommended to me as proving the guvnor’s nobility of soul. I thought it might be worthwhile to have it as a defence against Alfred, in case his drinking in the great port city of Sydney had brought out the melancholy son in him. I asked the clerk to direct me to Mr Dickens’ essays and he accompanied me on the quest. ‘Any particular essay, sir?’

  ‘Just some of the shorter ones. From Household Words, for instance. I’ll just look through a few tables of contents.’

  He left me to the search amidst a thicket of my father’s dimly perceived creatures – Pickwick and Sam Weller, of whom I’d heard, through David Copperfield to Sydney Carton, and of course Mr and Mrs Rokesmith, whom I’d never met except in the form of the Fremmels, engaged on their serious escape by the use of names that were in many senses noms de plume.

  I found what I was looking for in the form of a thin bound volume, similar in shape and size to Mother’s What Shall We Have for Dinner? It was entitled Charles Dickens’ Proposal for a Women’s Asylum, together with ‘An Appeal to Fallen Women’, and ‘The Tale of Urania Cottage’ by the Right Reverend Cooper. It was precisely what I wanted but I hoped the bookseller who wrapped it up for me did not think my interest was prurient. I was grateful for the Doctorate of Divinity after Cooper’s name.

  Again we had an entire carriage for our use, but this time our return to normal life was symbolised by the fact that a number of other carriages occupied by customary passengers were attached to the train. In our spacious compartment, Alfred slept, and Fred Trollope talked drowsily to me, confessing an interest in a police magistrate’s daughter in Forbes.

  ‘A police magistrate?’ I asked. ‘Handy for tracking down cattle duffers.’

  ‘Not always so,’ Fred told me, yawning, his eyes dreamy, possibly from the memory of the girl. ‘The miscreants of Australia are always able to steal better horses than the government provides to the police magistrates. It was something I meant to bring up with old Cowper. So many matters to bring up with him!’

  After crossing the mountains we reached the terminus near the town of Bathurst. The colonials did have a tendency to name things, towns and rivers after the worst of recent Tories. Bathurst had been a monster in my father’s eyes, and so was Castlereagh. Darling had apparently been a high Tory governor of New South Wales, authoritarian and cramping, and his name was on our western river.

  These were the sorts of disconnected musings that were not as delicious as the memory of my companion from two nights before, through whom I felt I had entered a new plane, losing old confusions and acquiring new ones.

  The next morning, after we had all slept soundly, recovering from the excesses of the capital, Fred said goodbye to us and we pledged to each other that we would meet up again if his father came to Australia, as ours had always thought he might but now never would. Fred Trollope seemed to have no divided feelings about his father. The father and mother were still together, though Mrs Trollope was believed to be something of a shrew. But there was nothing sharp-edged about Fred.

  Alfred and I took to the tedium of our carriage and passed through towns at the trot with nothing processional about our passage, just two gentlemen drovers on their way back to the outer stations. Alfred put down a copy of Australasian Sketch with a cover illustration of a bushfire and fleeing cattle and settlers. He had the sort of moodiness that I feared might lead to his carping.

  ‘They say a drought is on the way. And as charming as Corona might be, I’d rather wait it out in a tidy little town like Hamilton – that is not eight days’ ride from Melbourne, either. Do you know they call the country around Hamilton “Australia Felix”? Sweet enough, eh? A jockey club! And a railway on its way. And you could work for me and start your own branch when you turn twenty-one.’

  But the abiding problem was that his drinking made him moody and brought him to the issue of our family, and in that matter I could be his only responder whenever he might return to the guvnor issue.

  ‘You would have been very young,’ he said suddenly. ‘But do you remember the maid named Anne?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. Mama’s maid Anne.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. He got her to put up the first partition in their room. Mama’s own maid. Do you remember?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I replied. ‘When you’re five years you know there are reasons, but they are like the reasons of Greek gods.’

  ‘Inscrutable,’ suggested Alfred.

  ‘That’s the word.’

  ‘But it isn’t inscrutable now, is it? You’re old enough to know what a partition means.’

  I did not answer.

  ‘So Mama never complained to you? About that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or, try to turn you against the guvnor?’

  ‘No, she never did.’

  ‘Nor with me,’ he said. ‘It was her gentle way.’

  I said nothing. If I had agreed, I could not predict where he would take us.

  ‘He never sent you to the Boulogne school,’ said Alfred. ‘I went the same year the partition went up.’

  I felt guilty relief to have been saved from the Boulogne school and its two clergymen-headmasters. I had only been to France for holidays, and I remembered a wonderful kite the guvnor flew outside our villa, which had a marvellous name like Villa du Camp de Droite or some such – the Villa of the Camp of the Army of the Right. I was three and on the watch for flamboyantly uniformed French soldiers. Whereas for my brothers Boulogne meant a stern curriculum (though you could learn to fence) and the freezing dormitories the brother clergymen thought good for boys. The cold was all French and the cooking all English, my brother Henry had once told me. A bad mix.

  ‘He could have moved away himself,’ said Alfred. ‘But he was too selfish. He wanted the house and the staff. And wanted to keep Aunt Georgie running it. How do you think Mama felt?’

  ‘Whatever the man’s sins,’ I argued, ‘surely his death atones.’

  But his eyes were pinpointed and he did not seem to hear me.

  ‘And then there was the engraved bracelet business.’

  I had heard rumours of the bracelet but had not quite understood when I was little. Apparently it was delivered to Mama with some message for the girl. It seemed to me at the time to be part of the higher wisdom of adults to take offence at such things. Now I realised what a bad business it was. But I had an inspired thought and said, ‘If you admire how Mother bore these afflictions,’ I argued, ‘why are you not willing to imitate her now? No large complaints from her have appeared in the newspapers. No word against anyone. So please calm down, Alfred.’

  ‘But you see, Plorn. Sending us away to Boulogne – it cleared the house of anyone who could reproach him.’

  ‘Katie and Mamie were there. And Aunt Georgie, Mama’s own sister! They were with him and could reproach him. And Katie did it.’


  I knew this somehow, that he was reproached by Katie.

  ‘That’s when he took up his public readings with a vengeance,’ said Alfred, as if that were a plot to escape Katie’s ire. ‘And at the end of the winter, poor Charley had the indignity of meeting the guvnor and that Ternan girl by accident on Hampstead Heath.’

  Alfred shook his head as he stared out of the carriage. ‘There’s so much shame. We don’t even talk about that train crash! You tell me Frankie called him Christ-like. Did Christ send jewellery to the wrong woman? Did he send a wife back to her mother, and then masquerade as the Christmas storyteller above all others?’

  I was silent, just wanting him to stop his tirade. He reached a hand out to my shoulder and his anger gave way to pleading. ‘Remember, if you and I cannot look at these things, who else will?’

  ‘All right,’ I said testily. ‘But talk about him like a man with faults, not like an arch-villain. I will never believe in the arch-villain.’

  ‘You won’t?’ he challenged me. ‘How many thousand miles then are you and I from Gad’s Hill?’

  ‘He did it from love, Alfred. From love!’

  We were quiet for a while, despairing of seeing eye-to-eye. ‘He certainly loved us when we were little,’ he said then. ‘He adored you. The Plornnishmaroontigoonter. Absolutely enchanted! He had us calling you J. B. in W., which stood for the Jolliest Boy in the World. “Has anyone seen the J. B. in W.,” he’d ask us. It was later in our childhoods he got frustrated with us. Except for Henry, who was a brain. Once he told me I’d got my lack of application from Mama’s family, by which he must have meant Mama and Aunt Helen, because he had respect for Aunt Georgie.’

  I admit that I was subject to similar reflections from the guvnor. I realised by now that I had been mistaken in trying to silence Alfred, because he would not be silenced. He might become a different man if I let him finish the story his way, and then perhaps he would not need to go through it again and again – it might all take on the quality a settled difference between us.