The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind? I notice that he always writes as if his present life were the be-all and the end-all of his emigration, and as if I had no idea of you two becoming proprietors, and aspiring to the first positions in the colony, without casting off the old connection.

  From Mr Bear I had the best accounts of you. I told him that they did not surprise me, for I had unbounded faith in you. For which take my love and blessing.

  They will have told you all the news here, and that I am hard at work. This is not a letter so much as an assurance that I never think of you without hope and comfort.

  Ever, my dear Alfred,

  Your affectionate father

  So, it was established then. My father had never known that I’d applied myself. I had failed to convince him before his death.

  A hollow creature again, I folded and replaced the letter. All the humanity of the evening drained out of me. I left Alfred’s bedroom and went straight to the veranda and – despairing of the homestead – out into the night. I knew how Dandy had felt now. Having come here to the extreme fringe of things, where could a person flee next?

  It occurred to me to go to the camp of the darks. I had been there once already since I’d ridden to Momba with Cultay, and delivered him to his wife. I had seen the child that survived the massacre.

  So I sought the Paakantji camp again, as the only possible place of relief. I believed I barely had the breath to get there.

  Given that Fred Bonney had not enforced Christmas upon the imaginations of the Paakantji in any evangelical manner, except as a day off work, the camp looked normal, unruffled by festivity. A number of men and women were soundly asleep in the open, due to the heat of the day just past. The child I had found after the killings was asleep next to one of the women. He would grow up without memory of the terror. On his mother’s breast, as Bonney would have it, given the earth was their mother.

  I felt grateful Cultay was there, sitting side-on to a small fire wearing a shirt and pants, with white paint across his nose, on both cheeks, and then up the bone of the nose to make a circle on his forehead. What was he doing in this priestly mode of his on what was for him a normal night, I wondered, unable to escape the suspicion he had waited up for me.

  He said nothing, but turned a little towards me and the fire, and there was an implicit invitation for me to sit down beside him. I did not greet him, nor he me, I just went round the fire and sat with him for about three minutes, lacking the capacity to think of something to say that was worthy of him. All I could manage in the end was, ‘Cultay, I’m finished. I’m eighteen years old and finished.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s like in your world, Cultay, but in mine it’s all useless,’ I added.

  I was not doing well in my confession of despair, I knew, but there was something about him that implied permission to speak as he stared into the fire still.

  All I could manage now was, ‘People make up their minds about you. And that’s the limit you have to run into, forever. That’s the limit of what you can be.’

  ‘You’ll get better, Mr Plorn,’ he told me. ‘That Belshire put a bad spirit on you.’

  It was in some senses obviously true.

  ‘Mr Plorn,’ he said again and handed me a lump of the same aromatic gum mixed with ash he had given me on the road to Corona the Christmas before. I had slept then. I had had a sense of being saved from something malign. I had dreamed too sharply and terrifyingly, but had felt renewed at dawn.

  ‘Take hold of it, Mr Plorn,’ he urged me and put his hand on my head a while, having never touched me before.

  This time I took a reckless mouthful and began to chew the gum with its vegetable, ponderous flavour.

  ‘You better lie down here,’ Cultay said.

  I spread myself beside him, chewing away as if for salvation. I felt a strange sense of expansion within me, a leap of the muscles and inner organs as if they had all been mute till now but had developed an ambition to be something else. It seemed I went straight into a state of dream, without intervening surrender or drowsiness.

  Thus I was now travelling down the moonlight-washed trunks of a rough aisle of ghost gums, and by one of them was the young man who’d resembled Yandi and whom the frightful Belshire had murdered. Streaks of white paint ran down the length of his body, from shoulders to ankles. He did not seem to resent what had befallen him but stood like an usher to accompany me. We went forward together as if to inquire into the night. It was a night as clear as the one I had left Cultay sitting in.

  There was firelight ahead by the banks of a creek or billabong. I heard many voices rising and falling in casual conversation, including Wilkie’s hearty voice. Mr Thackeray was there amongst the trees with his pug face, unhealthy paunch and decided frown. He was wearing a neat suit and an open collar as if he had been called from work, and he said, blinking, ‘Oh my God, doesn’t he act it for every last tear? It’s like Little Nell.’ He had made peace with Father on the Athenaeum steps, I knew, and they had shaken hands, but this sort of talk might make him an enemy again if he wasn’t careful. Mind you, Mr Thackeray had achieved the first level of inoffensiveness some years back by dying, like my companion. I heard then but could not yet see Daniel Maclise, the guvnor’s Irish favourite. ‘Jesus, you were a beautiful young thing, Charles, when I drew you and Catherine,’ he said, pronouncing the name Charl-less as he always jokingly had. He went on, ‘Billowy cheeks, lovely curls, misty skin, vaporous. Catherine looking as if she were made of mother’s milk!’ And then he added, ‘But translucent.’

  I could see nearly the whole company the guvnor had clearly gathered now. Everyone was there, it seemed – visiting the place for the first time and having a merry time. Wills, the real editor of All the Year Round, looked both sensitive and sensible in his great black fringe of sideburns, even though he’d been ill from the damage he’d done to himself in a riding accident. The Yandi-like man made no comment, but stood beside me, a patient attendant.

  They were chatting, Father’s friends, all along the banks of Momba Creek, and drinking punch from pannikins. I saw plump George Dolby, the theatrical manager. My godfather, Lord Lytton, long-faced and a little sad, which seemed usual with him. ‘Here’s Plorn,’ he called without any surprise, as if I was still in England and available to be encountered any old day. The barrel-chested and huge curly-haired and double-chinned Mark Lemon was present too, with his ox-like head. The guvnor considered Lemon had ‘gone across’ to Mama, but there’d been a time when Father had considered him a good friend, and so here he was, all rancour forgotten, drinking punch with the others.

  The Yandi-like dead man now took his station to one side of the company. Off in the trees, John Forster stood by frowning, wondering if he should impose order on the scene and the mourners. By him was old Clarkson Stanfield, who used to paint the guvnor’s backdrops for his plays. A kindly old Papist who’d painted St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall – a work of utter genius, the guvnor had said. Better than those damned Pre-Raphaelites. Stanfield wasn’t a great talker like the others but he walked across and asked me what the light was like on Momba, and I told him distractedly it was very glaring. For I was more concerned still with Mark Lemon, whom I’d been told had died not long before the guvnor. I went up to him and he surveyed me down the length of his ample cheeks.

  ‘I thought Father was angry at you,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all changed,’ he told me with a wise smile. ‘That was a misunderstanding.’

  And as if in pleasure at the new arrangement, he drank all of his punch in one gulp. As he did so, I saw the guvnor. He was seated in a chair by the bank of the creek. His upper body was bound with rags and there was a blindfold over his eyes. The Yandi-like spirit took in his presence as well. It was as if I could feel the absorption, one in the other.

  A little irritated about the way they’d treated my father, I told Lemon and Lord Lyt
ton, ‘I want to speak to the guvnor.’ My godfather took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye and said, ‘That bloody woman will be my death. My absolute death!’

  I knew he was complaining about his Irish wife, Rosina, who wrote novels about what a bad husband and what a rake he had been!

  ‘What if my mother was to write a novel about the guvnor?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, far too nice a woman for that, Catherine,’ said Lord Lytton. ‘Yes, a delightful girl. With too much pride to play that game, your mater.’

  Lord Lytton led me to my father, with the Paakantji spirit at my right. The guvnor was sitting on an ordinary kitchen chair. Under the bonds that held him to the chair he was in shirtsleeves, and there was a pannikin beside him on the ground, so when they were finished with the game they were engaged in, and untied him, he could drink. I wanted to save him from this silly game of blindfolds and rag ropes. When I arrived in front of him, I said, ‘I have applied myself, Father. I have a groove. You should tell Mr Bear, whoever he is.’

  He seemed to me to be smiling at my voice. ‘Dear old Plornish, is that you? Come to the rescue. Take off this blindfold, eh? Undo it at the back.’

  I reached my hands over his shoulders and undid the knot at the back. The blindfold fell away as soon as I unknotted it. I wished so earnestly to see his face, but he had no eyes when the cloth fell away. There was a vacancy there that was deeper than a pit.

  I asked him, ‘But what has happened to you?’

  I felt a pity flowing from me for the father who had become a chasm, and a feverish ambition grew to save him. Yet there was casual talk all around me, talk of the Adelphi Theatre and magazines and the Academy, and of other men’s wives. He stretched away from me, his was a mouth that opened in the earth, a great wound in the fabric. And still the others went on gossiping around him without any ill will, though their normality was an insult to him. For they could see, and he could not. The Yandi-like dead man was equally appalled and came up to watch me release my father from the chair. The Belshire victim led him fraternally out into the stream. I could see his thin shoulders and then I saw the flow of water and could not see him at all. The chair on the bank was empty.

  Now it was obvious: my father, the guvnor of guvnors, wrote letters that were as piteous in their ignorance as was his present condition, his utter ignorance of the earth. He was not to be held to blame at all. He no longer knew of the sun, let alone of me. He was not to be believed anymore as a judge amongst the living. He had lost no power to charm but all his power to bind. Such a kind of father must be forgiven. The breathing and moving son was not to be assessed by one who perished too soon, bearing his old ignorance. This seemed so clear, so simple, that my despair appeared to me now to be at heart a peevish thing, not quite a trifle, but almost a conceit.

  I woke at dawn in saffron light with Cultay sleeping on the far side of the dead campfire. The dust was mauve.

  That night the company were tired after the revels of the previous day, but when Connie and her sister presented themselves at the piano, I came forward and announced, ‘With your kindly permission I intend to ask the Misses Desailly to let me perform with them in a faulty tenor, much less in quality than Mr Hayward’s.’

  Everyone said it was a good and novel idea, and Mrs Desailly said half-satirically, ‘What affront!’

  I asked the ladies if they knew ‘Ae Fond Kiss’. They did, and they had the music in Blanche’s portfolio.

  ‘On three,’ Connie whispered to me as Blanche played the introduction.

  For the first time in my life, I was going to sing before other humans.

  ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever,’ Connie and I began, like one voice.

  At ‘sever’ she smiled and we gazed at each other amidst the long applause. Then we turned ourselves to the next lines, which were like a statute against the undue influence of death.

  Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

  Ae fareweel, and then forever!

  Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,

  Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee . . .

  Yet I sang the doleful lines like an anthem of praise to some proposition just beyond the reach of my hands, which reconciled the living and the dead.

  Acknowledgements

  Apart from the works of the immortal Charles Dickens, I should acknowledge the major modern biographies relating to the author and his family. These include: Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (2011); Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (2009); Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1991); Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (1988). John Forster’s foundation work The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4) is also essential reading.

  Claire Tomalin wrote, as well, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan (1990), and Robert Garnett did in this decade past produce Charles Dickens in Love (2013). Further dimensions were added to my story by Andrew Lycett’s Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (2013) and The Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins, edited by Laurence Hutton (1892). Great light was shed on the career of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Plorn’s godfather, as it was on other notable Victorians including Thackeray and Dickens, by Clare Clark’s charming (I assure you) book The Great Stink (2005).

  For correspondence, of course the starting point is The Letters of Charles Dickens (1836–1870), edited into three volumes in 1880 by Mary Dickens and Georgina Hogarth. In the matter of letters, I have done light editing of some I quote, and have in a few cases constructed letters from Plorn’s siblings as a way of economically conveying the emotional luggage Plorn brought with him to Australia. The letter that causes Plorn such distress near the book’s end is authentic, although also very lightly edited.

  In the cases of Plorn’s brothers and sisters, I was helped by Robert Gottlieb’s Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (2012) and by Lucinda Hawksley’s Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artistic Daughter (2006). The same author’s Charles Dickens and His Circle (2016) is also a most useful handbook. Sir Henry Fielding Dickens’ Memoirs of My Father (1928) is of great interest since Henry was the Dickens who saw Plorn off to Australia and was close to him in age.

  It is indisputable that Catherine Dickens has not drawn the eye the way her coruscating husband has, yet she is a fascinating woman in her own right and one who was, in the belief of some Dickensians, grievously wronged. Lillian Nayder’s The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (2012) passionately champions her.

  As for Alfred and Plorn, the sources include A Tale of Two Brothers: Charles Dickens’s Sons in Australia by Mary Lazarus (1973); Jeannette Hope and Robert Lindsay, The People of the Paroo River: Frederic Bonney’s Photographs (2010); Bobbie Hardy, Lament for the Barkindji: The Vanished Tribes of the Darling River Region (1976); and Frederic Bonney’s article, ‘On Some Customs of the Aborigines of the River Darling’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 13, 1883, pp. 122–37.

  Notice that Bobbie Hardy’s book spells the tribal name of the people of the Paroo and Darling rivers differently from the spelling I have chosen, as the way it is spelled in this text has become more common since Hardy’s book was published.

  Last of all, I must beg the tolerance of all Dickensians for creating what we do not know: the circumstances and means by which, in an Australia not yet connected to the United Kingdom by telegraph, the colonial Dickens boys became aware of rumours and then of the certainty of their dazzling father’s death. I have also invented the Sydney memorial services. My hope is that these confections work well enough not to outrage anyone, and also to pay tribute, insofar as lesser writers can, to the incomparable inventiveness of Charles Dickens himself.

  Also by Tom Keneally

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksm
ith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-rate Kingdom

  Schindler’s Ark

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  Towards Asmara

  By the Line

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Jacko

  A River Town

  Bettany’s Book

  An Angel in Australia

  The Tyrant’s Novel

  The Widow and Her Hero

  The People’s Train

  The Daughters of Mars

  Shame and the Captives

  Napoleon’s Last Island

  Crimes of the Father

  Two Old Men Dying

  Non-fiction

  Outback

  The Place Where Souls Are Born

  Now and in Time to Be:

  Ireland and the Irish

  Memoirs from a Young Republic

  Homebush Boy: A Memoir

  The Great Shame

  American Scoundrel

  Lincoln

  The Commonwealth of Thieves

  Searching for Schindler

  Three Famines

  Australians (vols I, II and III)

  A Country Too Far

  (ed. with Rosie Scott)

  Australians: A Short History

  For Children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  Roos in Shoes

  VINTAGE

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  First published by Vintage in 2020

  Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Company 2020

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