by David Brooks
Tarren Bridge, when at last they came to it, was like a self-fulfilling prophecy: a sturdy wooden rail-bridge with a large coastal lake beside it, the river supplying the lake flowing beneath the bridge and three roads converging solely in order to cross it or to add further to the loads of the trains that did so. There was a handful of buildings only, some ten or twelve, depending upon how you classified a couple of empty and derelict pine-offcut huts slowly sinking to their knees on the marshy lakeshore. Only four of the buildings were on the southern end of the bridge. The rest, obviously the hub of the town, clustered about the north end – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say clustered about the two storeys and wide, dilapidated verandah of the Three Ways Hotel, the most imposing structure in the place. One of the least of these, little more than a large galvanised-iron shed with a holding-yard on its non-town side, proved to be the Tarren Bridge Railway Station, although instead of a station-master a crude sign nailed to the shed door directed readers to enquire at the shop over the tracks. There – having been directed by the younger of the O’Briens, who had stayed on a minute or two to see her safe before retreating to the pub – a young boy of no more than eleven told her authoritatively that the train had not yet come, but that this was its day, and that she could buy herself a ticket from the conductor. And yes, it stopped at Nara, and Wellington, and Hoburn Mouth, and then went all the way to Eden – a fact which he disclosed as if it had some profound significance.
It was the third town she stopped at, the smallest and perhaps not even the prettiest, but at least, even from what passed as its station, she could see the sea, which she had been glimpsing for an hour already from the train window with mounting fascination and a sudden determination that this, at least – a wide expanse of deep-blue water with a seemingly limitless horizon and a scent in the air unlike any that she had ever encountered before – was something that she must have. It was almost dark, and the day had been very long. Along with the sea, or what was at least a river mouth, opening onto the bay, she could see also – as the man had told her she would and as even now he was pointing out to her – a squat wooden building with a verandah around its front and seaward side and a sign above the front door that said Lodgings. The day would have to end somewhere. This seemed as good a place as she was likely to find.
Nara had been a disappointment, or if not a disappointment exactly – for she could fault Mrs Goodleigh only on its size – then at least so much larger than she had been led to expect that a kind of panic had seized her even before the train had come to a halt there. In the busyness of ascent and descent, the groups of people jostling to get their baggage onto trolleys, the unloading of mail and the loading of empty milk-cans, she had found herself frozen to her seat in fear of being swallowed amongst them, of disappearing beneath the surface of this sudden river of people, for in truth, small as the crowd might have been, she had never before seen so many people gathered in one place. With a composure that came of absolute desperation she asked the conductor, when he came to see if she needed any help in getting off the train – for she had bought a ticket for Nara – whether the next stop, Wellington, was a smaller town than this. Yes, he had answered, in some puzzlement, and Hoburn even smaller, but perhaps, since he had obliged her with only a shrug when she asked if she could pay him extra to go to them, he was used to a certain amount of indecisiveness on New South Wales Government Railways.
It was while she was talking with the conductor that the man had come in and sat down opposite her in the carriage. At first, as they waited for the train to begin to move again, he stared at her almost resentfully, as if she had no right to be there and he had expected to have the compartment to himself. He continued to stare as the train moved off, and to avoid his eye she had looked intently out the window as they passed at first the yard of a large sawmill, then a set of houses and perpendicular-running streets at the further end of one of which she imagined the cemetery might lie, overlooking the ocean that at this point she was herself yet to see. By the time she looked back towards him, the train having plunged into a vast forest of spotted gum, he had closed his eyes, stretched his legs out to one side, and apparently gone to sleep.
As they pulled in to Wellington, however, and just as, absorbed increasingly in her own thoughts and the immensity of the world she was passing through, she had almost forgotten him, he had spoken to her from behind, making her heart leap:
‘Is this small enough for you?’
She had turned, caught unawares, and in the moments before she answered – for she saw with relief that the question had not been intended maliciously, and that some answer might be possible: he seemed, suddenly, almost kind – a second question suddenly needed an answer also:
‘Yes … I think. But is there a place to stay?’
‘I can’t answer that. I imagine so. But there is a place at Hoburn, too, and you might find Hoburn a little less godforsaken,’ and then, seeing that she seemed to relax a little at this information: ‘I can show it to you, if you like, when we arrive. It’s just by the railway station.’
With this, although visibly relieved, she slipped almost immediately back into her own thoughts. Seeing that she had done so, he reached into his pocket, took out a small, thick, blue-covered book with a tiny golden mermaid on the spine, sought out a page almost a third of the way through it and – quite unaware of the extent to which, when the girl turned again from the window and saw what he was doing, and watched him turn page after page, this added to the marvels of her day – began to read.
Mrs Biggs talked to God, or rather with Him. That was her secret, for a number of people, impressed by her stamina and daunted by her certainty, felt that she must, after all, have a secret – beyond, that is, her own deeply engrained Scottish-ness which was a secret to nobody, or at least did not remain so after the first minute or two of their acquaintance. She talked with God almost continually, although, she hoped, also quite inaudibly, and would sometimes check her mouth, hold it while she spoke, to make sure it was not moving. If other people could not hear God as he was speaking to her that was their own affair; He was certainly loud enough; but she had long ceased being amazed by either His particular interest in her or the apparent deafness of everyone else to it, even of the most devout of those six or seven who came to hear her preach every second Sunday, in the tiny weatherboard church she had built with her own hands twenty years ago and painted a fresh, bright yellow every spring – a non-denominational church, it should be said at the outset, simply The Church of God, since that was one of the many firm things He had told her: ‘Avoid Denominations’, even the Presbyterian that would have been her own choice, for they would lead only to interference, the need to agree with others.
That, then, was her secret, the wellspring of her hope; that is why she was prepared and, after feeding the two men from the mill and Mr Enger who virtually ran the shop now Mr and Mrs Rieux were unable to do it, had left half her own dinner, for the possible stranger. That she did so almost every night and that the others, her boarders, might have seen the business differently – it was, after all, only her habit to leave herself a second portion on the stove-top, covered by an inverted soup plate, for later – hardly mattered. In this as in some other regards – the farthings of existence that although one should watch them were not always worth the watching – she had a selective memory. If the after-dinner person, whether from the train or road or forest or sea, did not turn up, then obviously it had been God’s portion after all, and having given Him time enough to absorb the sustenance transcendentally, it was only common sense to take care herself of the material remains, to avoid throwing it out, or giving it to the already-overfed cat.
This was why, if the truth be truly told, she was not greatly surprised to have a ragged, red-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, pale with exhaustion, knock at her door at a few minutes past eight on a Thursday evening just after the train had left for Eden. This is why she had food for her, already on a plate and hot fr
om the stove: mutton, potato, gravy, peas. And a bed, and so few questions, and a welcome as if all along she had been expecting her.
In all the enormous gratification of such an Arrival, it was some days before Mrs Biggs got down to Practicalities, at least as far as her new and sudden guest was concerned. A number of the most important had been touched upon, of course, as early as that first evening, in her rapturous late conference with her Collocutor, but only impressionistically, in passing, in the broadest strokes of her inspired brush. But it was inevitable, particularly given that other side of Mrs Biggs’ secret – a quiet but meticulous and relentless parsimony – that the question of money should also arise. It was not the only question that would have to be dealt with, of course. In fact there were several. She had even thought – a thought perhaps only possible from within the comfortable assurance of its negative – that there might be a certain classical symmetry to the event should this young girl prove to be with child, and should that child, when born, prove, under Mrs Biggs’ particular aegis, to have exceptional powers. But she had also thought better of this, since Hoburn Mouth was perhaps not the place: that New South Wales was not the place – that, perhaps, Australia could not be the place …
No. But the question of money, at least, should be looked into. And, failing the pregnancy – perhaps even in compensation for the benevolence, on that account, which she would not be able to expend (a delicate point of ecclesiastical economy) – it might even be appropriate if there were none, in order that she might be benevolent about that instead. Indeed, Mrs Biggs almost hoped it. So that when the matter was finally raised with the young girl, who had spent a great deal of the two days since her advent in bed or sitting on the bench at the centre of the small patch of grass a little to the left of the wharf at the end of the street, watching the water and the boats as if she had never seen such things before, there was, to the surprise of both parties, and after an initial embarrassing silence, something very like relief – on the landlady’s side to discover that there was none (it had all been spent on the train ticket), and on the side of the young girl, whose name, it seemed, was Valerie, to be offered so immediately and enthusiastically a way out. She was to be her landlady’s help and maid and companion, there was nothing else for it. And since this seemed to give each of them a sudden sense of direction, she was to begin at once.
Mrs Biggs kept a great deal in her head. And it is one of the characteristics of those who carry on a great deal of their lives in their head to think that somewhat more of life itself takes place there. Valerie found, in any case, that once a relationship of any intimacy had been established with someone – such as her maid, or her companion – Mrs Biggs was inclined to presume that they knew a great deal more of her thoughts, plans and routine than she herself had ever communicated to them. The girl had adjusted somewhat in the few weeks since she had stepped off the train – non-communication and the rudimentary telepathy that often goes with it were hardly unknown to her – and had even devised certain strategies to ward off some of the more predictable difficulties, but she was nonetheless surprised to find that she had been expected to have somehow known that, on the first Sunday afternoon of each month, having tended to her small flock in Hoburn in the morning, it was Mrs Biggs’ custom to go to the aboriginals at Disaster Bay, and to set up a kind of booth there, out of the back of Mr Emery’s truck, and to preach a shorter and easier, if also perhaps more patronising version of the service she had offered Hoburn, and that she, Valerie, was now expected to go with her.
More than the travel, or the aborigines, or the prospect of further encounters with the unknown just as she had been getting used to the unknowns already about her, it was the thought of a second service in one day that alarmed Valerie. Tiny as her church and congregation might have been, Mrs Biggs’ Hoburn services were a major matter, the centre of the week, a fulcrum about which everything else in the boarding house turned. Having advertised, on Tuesday morning, the subject of her sermon in elaborate chalk letters on a large board outside, beneath the place where the time had been more permanently lettered in paint, she would begin to prepare two days ahead, first by donning her wire-rimmed reading glasses and retreating into the room she deemed her Office to bring together, for the best part of the Friday, the various ingredients of her address, insisting on such absolute silence in the house about her as she did so that it was safest to stay out of doors as much of the day as was possible. And then, on the Saturday, there was the preparation of the church itself, the sweeping and cleaning (much of which she now delegated to Valerie), the gathering and installing of flowers – no mean accomplishment in a place that seemed determined to produce only blackberry thickets and weeds, but Mrs Biggs seemed somehow to force flowers into existence, sturdy chrysanthemums and hydrangeas most notably, through the sheer power of her will – the selection of hymns and changing of the numbers on the small display-board by the lectern – no room here for a pulpit, much as she might have liked one – before shutting the doors and, sequestered with her Collocutor, turning to her beloved miniature organ to practise the hymns.
Made, as a well-polished brass plate to the upper right of the music-rest explained, by the Hammer Brothers of Edinburgh in 1848, so beloved to her were this instrument and the sound it made, and the hymns that could be belted out upon it, that an impartial observer might have been forgiven the thought that she had created her tiny church to incorporate it: certainly it took the pride of place and (since it was in fact the size of a small wardrobe) very nearly a quarter of all the available space within the building. Her congregation – rarely more than eight or nine, and more commonly six, since her three permanent lodgers appeared to draw lots for their Sunday free – may have been variously numbed or soothed into an occasional shameless narcosis by her labyrinthine, semi-mystical sermons and long-winded prayers, but they were always, at once and to a person, dismayed and widely awakened by the hymns. Mumble, whisper, or try boldly to give voice to them as they might in response, and one had to respond, nothing could ever quite inure them to the alarming sight of Mrs Biggs, her floral skirts hitched up over her large knees, leaning back, pumping and pounding her way through the music, bellowing out the words in a voice that was at once stentorian and never got a note wrong. In fact, Valerie had thought the first time she watched her, the old lady was positively transformed, though in a way it would have been hard to describe: as if, perhaps, some large, exotic animal – a hippopotamus, say, or rhinoceros – had begun to dance, but not only that, had begun to dance gracefully.
Having appeared in Hoburn, in any case, on the Thursday just after the first Sunday of the month, Valerie had been through this process three times so far, and was girding herself for a fourth when, by way of another matter entirely, her landlady alerted her to the fact that not all of her Sunday afternoons would be free. A month or two later and she would learn to see the signs – the sermon prepared on the Thursday, the practice on Friday, all day Saturday spent baking, the whole week’s routine gone one day awry.
The truck itself took some of the apprehension away. The sheer, cacophonous enormity of it first and foremost, but then the ease with which Mrs Biggs manipulated it, made it move, and the fact, disclosed with some pleasure as they dipped and bounced and jerked and thudded through the dust – making the dust behind them, in great clouds on the smooth, straight patches of the logging road along the top of the ridge – that it wasn’t Mr Emery’s vehicle after all, but that Mrs Biggs owned it herself, and merely leased it to him for his general haulage business. The best part of it all, according to Mrs Biggs, was that although Mr Emery had made it quite clear that he did not approve of what she was doing with the aborigines, it was just as clear a part of the arrangement that it was his task each month, just before her trip to Disaster Bay, to grease and service the truck and tighten up all the nuts and bolts and fix whatever else had come unstuck after his own trips had almost shaken the vehicle apart.
It was not such a long drive af
ter all, little more than an hour and a half, and the old Scotswoman’s exhilaration behind the steering wheel made it seem all the shorter. Only to the point at the far end of the sound, some fifteen miles, and then only so far as that because the road – two more-or-less parallel dirt tracks disappearing unpredictably into puddles, or stretches of mud or sand – had to skirt a large coastal lake, the entrance to which was most of the time a mere sandbar. By beach, Mrs Biggs said, the trip would be only four or five miles, but she couldn’t take the truck onto the beach. It was true; you could look back, as they did from the ridge-top before they descended, and see around the bay – across the three long white beaches, bordered by the black hourglass of bush with the sandbar at the centre of it, that ran between them and the lake – the white buildings of Hoburn and the tiny clear space that was the river mouth.
The aboriginal settlement itself did not face Hoburn and was quite invisible to it. It sat instead in a small cove on the other side of the point, a bleaker place in one sense, since the rocky head gave it scant protection from the open ocean, but also more dark and wild and beautiful, since the forest immediately around it on this side, protected by the steepness of the incline and bearing less of the prized cedar, had been largely left to stand by the timber-getters who had felled the area twenty years before. Here, as almost nowhere else for twenty miles up and down the coast, giant trees came down almost to the shore where they towered over the small clearing with its eleven houses, its sheds, its fire-circles, its small pebbly beach and jetty.
