Above the Starry Frame

by Helen Townsend

  ‘That little girl I’ve been seeing, she’s wanting me to get spliced,’ said John Geddes. ‘I think I shall avoid the matter entirely by going to the New Zealand diggings.’

  Bridget gave Geddes a cool glance. She did not like him. He was full of ideas on the Chinese and their wickedness, and the Roman Catholic Irish and their failings. Poverty was their only failing she could think of, and that was not so much a failing as a misfortune. Yet he had already left a child of his own in Ireland for its aunt and uncle to support. Bridget had read Geddes a letter from William’s father that had mentioned little Mary Ann, whom he’d left in Ireland, and suggested he might send some money back. She and Geddes had been very cool ever since.

  Many of Robert’s friends had told him to leave for another place when Birdie found she was with child, but Bridget had given him the woman’s point of view, quite forcibly, so Robert stayed and married Birdie. William had known she was right, or almost right, it only being complicated by the fact that Robert’s Birdie was in some way not quite good enough, and then more complicated by the fact that she was a Catholic, which didn’t matter so much when a person was drinking in a bar, or working down a mine, but seemed like it might matter with a wife and children, being a question of who you belonged with, as well as what you believed. But he’d said nothing of it writing home, for there it was an even larger matter.

  ‘Will you have the last chop, Joe?’ William asked. Joe Brown was recently arrived from Knockaleery. William had helped Joe when he arrived, as he did with all people coming from home, and they’d become fast friends. Joe was a nervous fellow and stood on one foot and then the other, fiddled with his hands and often had a worried look. But he laughed a lot, and had great good humour which always seemed to be fighting with his anxieties for possession of his features. William liked him very much indeed.

  ‘If I have the last chop, my policeman’s uniform won’t fit when I get back to Melbourne,’ said Joe, ‘and there’s nothing worse than a fat Irish policeman running after villains, wearing a coat that’s too tight. It reduces the dignity of the force somewhat. Especially in this heat.’

  They all laughed, and Robert took the last chop. ‘Remember that year the snow was so high Father had to cut through to the road so we might go to school?’ he said.

  ‘’Tis miserable snow we get in this country,’ said John Geddes. ‘Grey sleet and ice only.’

  ‘All snow’s miserable enough,’ said Robert. ‘I like the sunshine of this country, I do.’

  It was a hot day, hotter than a day ever was in old Ireland, with more flies and dust, and the grass more brown than green, and the strange black swans out on the lake. William liked these black swans now, as he liked the loud Australian magpies, and the coloured parrots that some on the diggings used to cook up into pies, and the laughing bird that woke him every morning. These things were no longer strange to him, but felt as things should be.

  Bridget was picking the daisies, same as grew in the grass in Ireland, and tickling little William Joseph with them. William picked up the baby and put him on his shoulders. Little William tossed off his father’s hat, patted his head and pulled at his hair.

  ‘He’s thinning out your hair on top,’ said Bridget. ‘He’ll have you bald in no time.’

  ‘He’s practising to play drum in a brass band,’ said William. ‘The hair just tangles his rhythm a little.’ William loved the feel of the little hands pounding on his head and he kissed Willy’s chubby little legs. He and Bridget had lost their first baby, Anna Jane, when she was just sixteen months old. Bridget still kept a curl of her hair in the gold locket he had given her, and most nights they both woke to check their little William Joseph was taking one breath after another in the crib next to them. They never tired of looking at his fat cheeks and his blond curls, but the painful loss of Anna Jane was always there.

  Robert and Birdie too had lost their first baby, but neither seemed to feel the loss so sharply. It lay lightly, as did the death of Robert’s first wife, Jane. As for his son, James, Robert hardly seemed to regard himself as the boy’s father, although by all accounts he was a fine child.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ Bridget had said. ‘I think of our Anna every day. I don’t ever want to stop grieving her. When I’m an old lady, she’ll still be with me, my darling child.’

  That death had marked Bridget. She was as fierce, as changeable and as hard to please as ever, and sometimes sharp with William, more than he deserved, but he could forgive her anything, because she had suffered that great blow.

  Now, out in the hard, hot sunshine, death seemed not so close. Bridget got up and shook out her skirts. ‘Let’s all go over to the gardens,’ she said. ‘I heard there’s some fine flowers that the heat hasn’t ruined yet.’ The new botanical gardens and the lake were part of the plan for the beautification of the city, pleasure gardens for all to enjoy.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ said Birdie. ‘I’ll stay here and sleep with the babby.’

  ‘I’ll go and look at the pretty flowers,’ said Robert. ‘You know I like to please me brother’s wife and if you’re sleeping, dearie, you won’t notice me gone.’ He took Bridget’s arm. Robert often talked to Bridget, and William was glad of it, for he was sometimes troubled by his brother who was impetuous and unsettled, although most often very cheerful. Sometimes, he felt harsh towards Robert, and Bridget eased their relationship with her humour and charm, building a bridge between them when Robert squandered the money William gave him or failed to run his little public house out at Italian Gully in a proper way.

  ‘Come on, John; come on, Joe,’ said William. ‘Crowley is head gardener and for a man who knew nothing at all about digging gold, he’s turned mighty knowledgeable about digging flowers and trees. And I think my friend John Humffray’s having his own picnic over there. I’d like you to make his acquaintance. He was Minister for Mines in the government until last month.’

  ‘I like it in this country,’ said Joe. ‘We stand tall as the rest here. It’s a fine thing, this democratical business.’

  William thought often about the democracy they had dreamed of in the days of Eureka. It had turned out they weren’t all dreaming of the same thing, for as soon as Peter Lalor became one of the Ballarat members of parliament, he denied that he was ever a democrat at all. He seemed to have acquired a set against democracy as his voters understood it. This wasn’t what the voters of Ballarat wanted, and Lalor had to pursue his political career elsewhere, in the seat of South Grant. Humffray, on the other hand, remained true to his colours, but democracy was hard for men such as him who had no private means. When he had been a minister, he had a salary, but as an ordinary member of the parliament, he received nothing.

  They set off for the gardens, Robert and Bridget walking behind Joe Brown, John Geddes and William, who had little William on his shoulders.

  ‘I’m thinking I might go to New Zealand,’ said Robert. ‘There’s the rush to that place called Tuapeka.’

  ‘You can be lucky in a rush, but you can be unlucky too,’ said Bridget.

  ‘A pity I missed that first gold here,’ said Robert. He was easily moved to change, but easily talked out of it, the dreaming of it being more interesting to him than the doing. ‘My father wouldn’t send me, even though William was doing so well.’

  ‘It’s hard times for William since the hotel burned, though,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Don’t you miss the old Star?’ asked Robert. ‘That was a place, that was.’

  Bridget smiled and began to recite:

  ‘How is it,’ cried Tomkins to Jenkins one day

  ‘While I’m wretched and dull, you’re sprightly and gay,

  You’re growing quite fat, while I’m getting thin,

  I weep all the day, you do nothing but grin.’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ laughed friend Jenkins, ‘I go every night

  Where charmed is my ear and enchanted my sight

  To the favoured Star Concert Hall, of glorious renown,


  For music and drinks, the crack house in town.’

  ‘That’s champion,’ said Robert.

  ‘I wrote it myself,’ said Bridget. ‘We used to run it in the paper, until it wasn’t true no more. Diggers got settled and the theatre wasn’t good business. We was reduced to having wrestling, and those wrestlers argued to kingdom come about Cornish rules and Cumberland rules. Then we showed savage alligators for a shilling’s entry – smelly creatures they were. No, I was glad when it burned down. I was down on Billy for not insuring it proper, although I had to forgive him, on account of him being so brave and having the indignity of his trousers being stolen by some reprobate. And working his bar from the barber’s shop next door, the same day.’

  ‘I would have liked to run a theatre,’ said Robert. ‘It would be grand.’

  ‘Grand it was, when it was,’ said Bridget. ‘But those times are past, more’s the pity. I myself prefer working in the theatre than drudging about the house, although I have time to read a good many books now, which I like.’

  ‘Anything rather than farming,’ said Robert, ‘When I left Ireland, I swore I never wanted to see another sheep or another potato unless it was cooked and on my plate. My father, he could never see anything but farming. I like the hotel trade, but this rebuilding is a great expense.’

  ‘Billy helps you out when he can,’ said Bridget, ‘but he’s trying to find the money to start up again.’ She said it quickly and cheerfully, to stall any request for money.

  ‘He’s a fine brother,’ said Robert. ‘The finest of all my brothers. Not like brother Joseph – Joseph holds a grudge and he nurses it up like it were his own child.’

  Bridget laughed, and pulled on Robert’s arm to catch up to the others, but Robert pulled her back. ‘There’s something I must tell you, Bridget.’

  Bridget stood and watched Billy wishing the Humffrays Christmas cheer, knowing that whatever Robert would tell her would not be good news.

  * * *

  ‘Poor Humffray,’ said William, as he and Bridget were undressing for bed. ‘I hate to see a man of such fine intellect brought down with the cares of business.’

  ‘His fine intellect don’t extend to business, that’s the trouble,’ said Bridget. She dabbed some of the lavender oil he had bought her on her neck. ‘You’re lucky you have a talent for adding and subtracting commercial beans, Billy.’

  ‘When the calls on my shares stop and they pay some bigger dividends, I’ll be thinking to open a new hotel.’

  ‘I’d like to have money again,’ said Bridget. ‘Ironing your shirts is not my style at all, Billy.’

  ‘I know it’s not your style,’ he said. ‘And not quite the style I like my shirts either. I have to say, Bridget, there was a strange crease down my front when I was at Cuthbert’s signing for my life insurance. I was ever so slightly embarrassed.’

  ‘You should be embarrassed – to admit your wife is reduced to ironing your shirts.’

  He laughed, and pulled her onto the bed. ‘I never thought I’d have a wife so sassy. I never even imagined a girl like yourself. If my family ever met you . . . those letters you write to them, so dutiful and gentle. Do you ever think to write one the way you are?’

  ‘That’s the way I am in the writing of letters,’ she answered. ‘And if we’re back in Ireland ever, I imagine they might like me very well indeed.’

  ‘They would, they would,’ he said. ‘But you’d not be what they were expecting.’ He pulled her close into his arms. ‘Now tell me what brother Robert was talking to you about so serious. I hope he’s putting his mind to getting his place fixed.’

  ‘Robert’s like Humffray: he hasn’t got his mind tuned to business, except occasionally, and even then it drifts. There’s no use fretting over him – he’ll never make a mark like you. He’s a good man, only inclined to put enjoying his food and drink and company before all else.’

  ‘It’s a large inclination too. Drinking’s not a good thing for a publican to indulge himself with.’

  ‘He told me something more serious,’ said Bridget. ‘Something that won’t please you.’

  William sat up, his back to Bridget. He contemplated his toenails and thought he should cut them. He couldn’t remember ever cutting his toenails in Ireland. They certainly didn’t have the special scissors and files he had now for cutting nails, with a special box to contain the scissors and file. Such things, part of his life now, would have seemed comical back at Knockaleery. He often imagined showing them to his family and them all having a hearty laugh.

  ‘Has Robert not paid his debt to that grog trader out there?’ he asked Bridget. Robert thought William rich, but in truth, he was even more short of money than Bridget knew. He had calls on his shares, and his life insurance – to protect Bridget if he died – had cost him dear so he was stretched very tight indeed.

  ‘It’s nothing financial at all.’ She paused. ‘It’s to do with the child.’

  ‘Mary Jane?’

  ‘They had her baptised Roman Catholic.’ She put her arm around his neck. ‘Billy, I didn’t know what to say to him.’

  He felt a sudden explosion of anger. ‘Why did he do that? He married the girl. He made her respectable. Why has he gone and done this?’ He stood up and started pacing the room, feeling his heart racing in his chest. ‘Why would he? He’s the husband. Surely it’s up to him to decide such things. I can’t believe she could have forced him. She’s such a . . .’ He opened his hands, searching for words. ‘She’s hardly there sometimes. Why didn’t he take a stand? For the child at least, his own child.’

  ‘I asked him. She was at him, wearing him away, and the priest was always round, telling him it was his duty. Some of his friends told him he was obliged to, seeing as he married into the faith . . .’

  ‘He never married into the faith. They were married Church of England.’ It seemed to him that Robert had stepped over something, gone beyond something. The marriage itself had been hard enough, but now this.

  Bridget went on. ‘They said, just by marrying her, that any children come into her faith.’

  ‘He only had to say no.’

  ‘It’s only another religion, Billy,’ she said quickly.

  ‘That’s the point – a different religion entirely,’ he said harshly. But it was not only the difference in religion he cared about. It was a matter of where you belonged, who you belonged with, and despite the distance he had come, that still stretched back to Knockaleery and his attachment to his family, which, with a child of his own, he now felt and embraced more keenly. The teachings of his own childhood were solid in his mind, a foundation stone on which he built. It was how he thought, where he stood in matters of faith, no matter how far he moved in the world.

  ‘I’m telling you what he said to me. I know the difference is large, but then, we’ve got Danny Phelan working the bar here, and plenty of Catholic drinkers, and our tradespeople is mainly Catholic. Remember Father Smyth, whom you respected so much – at the Stockade, how he tended to his flock so brave. And your friend Michael O’Connell, whom you came to this place with. So why does it matter so much? I myself feel it matters, but when I ask myself why, I’m not so sure.’

  ‘It’s where he belongs that he’s thrown aside,’ said William. ‘It’s wrong he gave in to her and to the priest. Our family is Protestant. We read our Bibles, we worship in the English language, we don’t take direction from the priests. It means Robert’s family will be forever divided, him on one side, the wife and children on the other. Those are large things, Bridget.’

  It stretched back to Knockaleery, but the thing stretched forward too. He thought of Paddy Madden, whom he worked with on the Eureka field. Paddy came into the hotel, sometimes short of money. William sometimes lent him a little, but their lives were different now. Paddy lived out near Warrenheip in a log hut with his wife and children, who always looked ragged. Their former intimacy was not quite what it was, for William was aware Paddy had gone down in the world, and Paddy was awar
e that William had gone up. There were many Irish Catholics who made their way up in the world, but for others, like Paddy, their poverty seemed entrenched by their Catholicism. William himself had the Irishness of the Protestants, with its attachment to respectability and moving forward in life. He wanted Robert to move with him.

  Ballarat, to him, was a place of great opportunity. At Eureka, they had won political rights for the common man, and with those came the chance to build a city of industry and elegance that all might enjoy. Men like him who had arrived with nothing had a chance at prosperity and security, to move up in a way not possible back in Knockaleery.

  He thought of the mass path back in Ireland and the path his own family walked to church. That separation had for so long seemed to lie back in Ireland. But it was here in Ballarat too, in his family.

  There were things that he did not like about it. The question of respectability was more prominent now, and this was often wrongly attached to the matter of wealth or religion. He did not like the disdain with which the Catholic Irish were sometimes treated. He heard men of rank speak disparagingly about the ‘dirty Irish’, the ‘fighting Irish’ or ‘popish bastards’, which reminded him of the disdain with which he had been treated in Sydney. And such comments by eminent men discounted the close companionship he had shared with so many on the field.

  It made him think of that night long ago, when he had written down ‘equality’ as one of his principles. The thing was more complicated than when they had all been diggers together, but it still stood.

  ‘What will Robert tell our mother and father?’ he asked Bridget.

  ‘He chooses to tell them nothing at all, for it is not his own religion he has changed.’ Bridget hesitated. ‘But it’ll be done again if they have another child.’ William sat down on the bed and Bridget put her arms round him. ‘He isn’t a religious man. He doesn’t think of those questions as you do, for you have given them much consideration since you joined the Freemasons.’