The Conversations At Curlew Creek

by David Malouf

  Adair drank in the same spirit in which his jocular friend had proposed this toast; but as the unlikely agent of an event that had never in fact occurred, he regarded his pallid reflection in the glass above Saunders’ mantelpiece with discomfort and a growing impatience to be done with all this. Not just the business itself but the jokiness. It was a style whose edgy mixture of worldliness and dry self-mockery he had never quite taken to.

  Saunders had been regaling him with the latest version of his own legend; though the fact was, he had already heard it a dozen times over in the last week, from his barber, the Boots at the inn down by the quay where he had put up, the tedious fellows, shipping-clerks and chandlers’ assistants, who composed the table d’hôte where he took his evening meal; each time in a slightly different form as it suffered the slippage of a detail added here, a suggestion there, according to the narrator’s flair for story-telling or capacity for bold magnification, his assessment of the hearer’s credulity, especially if it was a new chum, and his own sense of what was not but ought to have been true. He was, frankly, sick of it. It had exhausted, in his view, whatever value it might have possessed as a mild joke; the best of which was that none of the story-tellers, even with the echo of the name as clue, had recognized in the rather dry fellow before them, with the crooked mouth and razored jaw that even at midday was in shadow, the embodiment of Irish effrontery and daring and Machiavellian guile that figured in such a daredevil manner in what they had to tell.

  ‘It has, you see,’ Saunders went on, ‘all the ingredients. It’s extraordinary how – complete it is. And how quickly all the elements have come together. What a well it is, the folk mind, of ignorance, speculation, the most extravagant sort of dreaming! It is Ossian, it is Homer, it is – if you will allow me a moment’s blasphemy – Genesis, the Five Books. Our minds individually may be quite tame and hidebound, but put them together, let them just dip a little, each one, into the great ocean of dream, and what comes out is tremendous. It is noble, terrible –’

  ‘Not quite in this case, surely.’

  ‘No, but the reverberations are. And just think of the way so many disparate things have come together! I’ve been hearing bits and pieces of this stuff for the past fourteen years, and now, by a kind of chemical explosion, alchemy, they have combined, and there it is, pure gold. All jokes aside – and I’m sorry, old fellow, that you should be so – ambiguously mixed up in it, but I find the thing extraordinary.’

  Adair did not commit himself.

  The story when he had first heard it astounded him, but not for the reasons Saunders suggested. Where had it sprung from? How had so many details of a thing only he knew, and had communicated to no one, got out of his head and become general currency, begun to make the rounds of barber-shops and shipping offices and barracks and the dinner-tables of the better class of merchants and gentleman farmers? – an event merely dreamed, when his moral faculties were for a moment in abeyance in the other-world of sleep, an act, to him impermissible, out of a freer and different life. The authorities’ insistence on having Daniel Carney done away with in secret, a hundred miles from the nearest place of settlement, had rebounded. Rumour was loose and had fabricated out of mere talk a story that for months now would muddy truth and haunt the place with unconfoundable ghosts.

  At the last moment Daniel Carney had been saved – that was the nub of it. The Irish officer who had been sent out to oversee the hanging had all along been in on the thing, but had played so skilfully his part of lawman and public official that even the prisoner had been deceived. Some sort of unmaking had taken place during the night they had spent locked up together. At dawn the prisoner, still shackled, had hobbled down to the shores of a large lake, or inland sea. His chains were removed and he was allowed to wash. While the other troopers watched from a distance, a boat paddled by natives appeared, who were involved it seemed in the ordinary business of spearing fish. But suddenly the natives produced muskets, and under their covering fire, the officer and the convict both had clambered into the boat and been whisked away into the mist, the natives being in reality members of a settlement of disaffected ticket-of-leave men and runaway convicts who, over the nearly forty years of the colony’s existence, had created, on the shores of a freshwater sea teeming with every sort of wildlife, a rival colony, a shadow Sydney as large almost as the original. Anyway, the officer, whose name was O’Dare, had become the hero of the hour, a true embodiment of the spirit of Irish resourcefulness and derring-do, and Daniel Carney a martyr miraculously resurrected; or O’Dare was a hateful renegade and confounder of the rule of law and Carney a dangerous rebel, once more on the loose.

  Intelligent opinion in the colony had at first laughed at so much superstition and lurid fantasy.

  There was no such thing, anywhere on the continent, as a golden city of escapees, an antipodean Cockayne run by riff-raff and runaway lords of misrule. And though the authorities had good hopes of discovering, somewhere in the interior, the long-promised and hoped for inland sea, there was no possibility from the scientific point of view of its being within a thousand miles of Curlow Creek.

  But the powers, in offering this reasonable reassurance, made no headway against the thunderous combination of ignorance and seditious fervour on the part of the refractory Irish and panic in those good citizens for whom the notion of a shadow colony, a second Sydney in the hands of drunken felons, former cut-throats or thieves, was the stuff of nightmare, and the more easily believed because as everyone knew, and even the Governor had to admit, no man had ever been there to put rumour to the test.

  ‘Which is what they will have to do, of course,’ Saunders stated with assurance. ‘Go out, I mean. And the sooner the better. It’s no bad thing that all this should have forced our hand. An expedition. Ostensibly to explore the little problem of our river-system, which refuses, like so much else in the place, to conform to the rules. But also to scotch once and for all the rumours of that other settlement. And if along the way they should happen to stumble upon an inland sea – personally I have little hope of it, the inland sea is in my opinion a mirage! – all well and good. They will certainly find something. There’s a lot of country out there.’

  ‘There is,’ said Adair, who had seen it.

  ‘You have no further thoughts then?’ Saunders asked when Adair had no more to add.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Rival settlement, inland sea.’

  Adair finished his port, set the glass down and gave the opinion that he had already delivered elsewhere.

  ‘The last is possible,’ he said, and lowered his gaze as there rose up and extended in his head that vast sheet of dazzling light he had come to the margin of in his dream, and his heart stirred a moment at the memory of its fish and birds, its promise of plenty. ‘There is a puzzle, certainly, that we have not solved. The rivers must flow somewhere. But the first I would have thought mere cloud stuff – a bubble, a hoax.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Saunders lightly, ‘and this from the man himself, the horse’s mouth!’ He sipped his port. ‘And you are not tempted to be one of those to make the test? Who will go and find out?’

  ‘You have heard some rumour to that effect?’

  ‘Ah, rumours! I have heard they offered you the opportunity to take out a party – horses, oxen, collapsible boats –’

  ‘To be the layer of my own ghost.’

  Saunders laughed. He leaned forward to refill Adair’s glass. Adair placed his hand across it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I too took it at first for a kind of joke.’

  ‘But they did offer.’

  ‘They did, yes.’

  ‘And you –’

  ‘Refused. It seemed,’ he said, pausing to find the right word, ‘unnecessary to add anything more than I have to the fascinating history of the place. I’ve done my bit, made my – contribution.’ When Saunders laughed he saw that his reflection in the glass over the mantelpiece had permitted itself a dour smile. ‘Even if it was an involuntary one, mere f
antasy, and made under a false name. The fact is,’ he said after a moment, ‘I am tired of all this. It has cost me something. You may laugh – I do myself – at the absurdities that have come of it, but the thing itself –’

  He did not go on. The rest of what he might have said dived underground, like one of those elusive rivers they had been speaking of, and Saunders, one eyebrow raised like a hook, was left hanging. He had no wish to speak of Daniel Carney, still less of Fergus; to add to speculation and mystery by admitting he had had his own purpose in being at Curlow Creek, and how much of himself he had left there – of his real self, of Adair – no less deeply buried than they were under a night, with its secrets and veiled desires, that was not the opposite of day but, for those who had entered its rich depths, the simultaneous underside of day, the swarming underside of life as it is lived, and as he would live it again, up there on the other side of the globe.

  Later, a little light-headed from the wine he had drunk and still touched by the mood of what had been left unsaid, Adair made his way downhill towards the quay.

  It may have been simply a tendency in himself, but it seemed to him that everything here, the lie of the land, the orientation and slope of the narrow streets, led in that direction: to the inns and dark little chandlers’ shops along the shore that served the sea-life of the town, to the water-steps from which lighters set out with gear and provisions for the ships at anchor between the scrubby islands, or with rival shouts and offers, to tout for business with the new arrivals from Europe and the Indies; towards the great spread of water that opened, through rocky heads, to the Pacific and home. He meant to go down once more and take a look at the Hyperion. He could scarcely contain his impatience now for dawn to come and their sailing-time. To be done at last with these years of moving from one place to another. To settle. To be at home.

  To settle.

  All round him here are the signs of a determination to confirm in this place a kind of permanency; which is not contradicted – quite the opposite – by so much that is unfinished. Even the grim bulk of the convict barracks when he comes to it – with its clock keeping local time, so many hours east of Greenwich, and behind it, slung in rows of hammocks, men sleeping out, as well as they are able, what each night contributes to their seven or fourteen years – has a new pile of rubble at its gates, where extensions are being made. It is hopeful, it is forward-looking. Even Saunders, for all his scepticism, would endorse that. But what it reaffirms in Adair just at this moment is his sense of displacement, a fear that what might be deepest in men is not this passion for making and building, for drawing the world within the confines of an established order, but some darker wish to annihilate the self with distance; that what we are really committed to in our hearts is unceasing motion, and what we raise in sunlight with the right hand, the left, out of a secret horror of the settled and stationary, will tear down in the dark.

  ‘And is it really,’ he asks himself, ‘the settled life that I hope for? Is that why I am going home?’

  He has written to Mama Aimée but not to Virgilia. It is not simply that any letter he might write now would have to travel on the ship with him, but that he wants at last to appear before her untrammelled and without intermediaries, in his own form, as himself; the new self that something in this harsh land and the events of these last months have created: a self that has journeyed into the underworld and come back both more surely itself and changed. He has discharged all she had asked of him as her agent in the search for Fergus, and if found, her emissary to him, and all that Fergus and his own conscience could demand in the way of brotherly affection and love. He is free. There is, at last, just the two of them. Free both, and with their lives before them. He will come to her in the assurance of what he has once and for all to offer, and which she must either accept or reject.

  But now, with the light of a new day making pale the sky towards the ocean, the tide rising, a journey to begin, he cannot resist the vigorous swing of his own soul upwards out of the dark. There is a lightness in his blood that is not simply the last heady effects of the wine he has drunk but something essential: an optimism that never quite leaves him, that has never left him, for all the darkness he is capable of – an aspect, perhaps, of that sturdy good health Virgilia once teased him with – the body, the body – which keeps him rooted in life, committed to unending returns. But she had been speaking of herself as well. They are for life, both of them.

  He is attracted as he walks on by an outpouring of light, unusual at this hour, from an open window a little below ground. When he approaches and leans down to see what it is, a rush of fierce heat strikes his face and through the flimsy stuff of his shirt.

  It is a bakery. A lean fellow in loose trousers and a white cotton hat is pushing mounds of dough, that sit very plump and round on a long-handled shovel, into the mouth of an oven. Drops of sweat fly from his face. Pausing a moment to draw the back of his hand across his brow, he deposits another shovel-load deep into the oven’s mouth. Adair watches entranced. A smell of yeasty dough, dark and intimate as seed, comes to him, with the sweeter one of baked crust.

  An assistant, a pale youth of maybe sixteen, whose eyes and mouth are mere holes in a clown’s face of powdered white, is punching with big fists and stringy, flour-dusted arms, at lumps of dough. He flips the dough and punches again. Baked loaves sit in rows on a tier of shelves.

  They are baking the bread that before dawn will be delivered by horse-cart and boys with covered baskets through the streets of the town; to be sliced and dipped into steamy bowls of chocolate in the better houses and weighed out as rations in the convict barracks. Something in the ordinariness of this, the rough uniformity of the rows of loaves, but also in the orderly immemorial routine, this night work that keeps bakermen pale and fills the bellies of those whose business it is to break stones or tend sheep or stride about with their hands behind their backs making deals in the sun, pleases him. He stands watching, held by the swinging repetition of the men’s movements.

  ‘Hullo there,’ he calls at last. ‘Will you sell me a penny loaf?’

  The clownface turns and squints to where he is leaning down out of the dark.

  The man with the shovel makes a gesture and the boy takes one of the smaller loaves and hands it up to him. He pushes into his pocket for a coin.

  ‘It’s all right, sir, it’s spoiled, as you see. Good luck to you.’

  He raises his hand in thanks and walks on, holding his warm, spoiled loaf, the last gift of a place that has taken so much from him but has given him something too that he cannot measure yet, though more than he had expected.

  He pauses a moment and pinches off a corner of the loaf, the salty sweetness of the crust in his mouth a kind of blessing. He chews as he walks on, his saliva mixing with its sugars and driving new light into his heart, refreshing his mouth like common speech.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my editor and publisher at Chatto and Windus, Jonathan Burnham, to Brett Johnson and Ivor Indyk who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions, and to Chris Edwards, without whose advice and dedication to every aspect of the text this would be a very different book.

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  First published in 1996

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  Copyright © David Malouf 1996

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  First published in Great Britain in 1996 by

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  ISBN: 9780701165710