A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  Gerald Seabrook, she observed, had risen to wave at the Malekula. “Hi!” he shouted across the water and made fatuous rowing signs. A deck-boy waved back, but nothing else happened and Gerald was forced to walk along the wharf past the crates and the wire fish-creels. A middle-aged blackfellow lay half-asleep with his old felt hat jammed down, his splayed toes resting on a rope-coil, at home to all the flies.

  “Excuse me,” Gerald said absurdly, “we want to go out there.”

  The blackfellow opened his eyes and blinked.

  Gerald pointed to the Malekula and remembered something and fished for a coin which the man inspected without passion, closing his eyes again.

  Miss Paradise began to walk along the jetty towards him. Gerald, in rage and lust for escape, cupped his mouth and hailed the boat over and over. At last Brinkman appeared on deck and stared across the blue thick water at him. He shouted something neither could understand, but after a little a dinghy pulled away and came towards the jetty.

  Gerald recalled his manners for once and stepped in ahead of Miss Paradise; but as he turned to hand her in over the side, he dropped his parcel into the harbour and when they fished it out it was a ruin.

  IV

  8 a.m., 10th December

  FATHER GREELY had been a spiritual investigator, the very private eye of ecclesiastical courts, for years. Padding across the tarmacs of airport terminals, through the spurious security of plastic and nylon carpeting in Gauguin colours that went with the terminal bars, he was a sinister figure in his black, much given to gaberdine overcoats and overstuffed briefcases. The nose, the formidable jaw, the baggy eyes and the hard mouth gave nothing away—he was a dangerous poker player—while his habit of reading a paper and watching over the top of it the farewelling unmarried couples gave his whole person an ambience of espionage. He carried his job like a disease.

  Now, having left the others by the Burns Philp Stores, under the awnings with their cameras clicking like crickets, he came up the main street along the water-front, his bulging grip clinging to official letters, two changes of underwear, three pairs of socks, an admonitory letter from the bishop and a secret communication from the provincial of the area. His strangeness attracted natives like flies. He was buzzed about by children and tried to smile, although the heat and the nuisance of it all were making him inwardly whimper.

  “Off now! Off now!” he kept saying as unbrusquely as he could manage, patting the thick air about him with his free hand. Not once did he think consciously of what he would have to say, to do, although those very things were all round him like climate. Or love. He did not know much about love, imagining from the cruciform tower where his bleak eyes watched the world that folk disported themselves as challenge to challenge. The bliss flaked off within months and there they were, the contestants, one battered, one victor, and the ropes sagging all round the ring. But when the beaten and the conqueror looked out over the crowd, faces were turned away, their souls or the features of them in shadow, and they too were all in pairs, wounding, striking, accepting.

  He wiped his face on his fourth handkerchief—Deladier had warned him things dried so fast in the heat there was no need to bring too much—and he swung right between the big store that sold plastic gimcrackery to the natives and the offices of Air-Torres, and paced steadily up the hill towards the mission buildings and Father Lake’s doom.

  Mulgrave was an ashen flurry in the parlour, somehow desexed in his cassock that he insisted on wearing for visitors despite the heat. One hand was fingering a frantic pocketed set of beads. Since his moralistic pounce three weeks before he had crumpled with a kind of social regret that made him tongue-tied before Lake and unable to regulate those functions which must be shared. He had tried at first to excuse himself—what else could he do? The morals of the parish, the young? Lake said, “Sure thing, feller, I’d have done pre-cisely the same, pre-cisely that. In fact I’d have emptied the bucket on me.” His charity only made things worse. So now when Mulgrave had to take in his hand that of the sombre Greely, the flower of guilt pressed between their obscene damp palms yielded a horrible conspiratorial scent.

  But,

  “It’s terrible weather. Terrible,” Greely commented, putting black hat beside bag and smoothing back his last strands of hair. “I found it dreadful pulling up the hill.” A fan was rebuffing his statements. He stood before it and let the air stream across his face. “Ah.” He let the breath of relief fall out of his mouth.

  “It’s always like this,” Mulgrave said. “I hardly notice any more, you know. I can’t even make a sacrifice of endurance.” He giggled nervously at that. He was not given to cynicism and came from a small town in the south where he had a dentist father and a dental nurse mother and three carefully scrubbed sisters with shockingly white teeth who had behaved predictably since they had first tottered across the unobtrusive family carpet. So had he.

  Greely submitted to the articulation of the fan for some seconds without looking up and then his eyes, which were like grey secret animals under the shaggy brows, ferretted into the other man.

  “I wondered—by the way, do you smoke? No? Then may I?—if we could move into some reasonably private place for a few words before I see the bishop.” His eyes glanced briefly at the ceiling as if it could conceal his man. “Perhaps lunch even. It might serve as a neutralizer of my presence.”

  “With Father Lake or without?”

  “Oh with, with. But not the bishop, I think, unless, of course, he’s going to be offended. I’m usually allowed to handle these things in the way I feel best.”

  “Of course.”

  Greely’s lumpy body was beginning to threaten. The alpaca shone along the seam-lines. It was a spiritual incandescence. Mulgrave was his final interest after all.

  “Are you happy here, father?”

  Mulgrave’s long uneasy face rippled as the flesh broke into tiny waves of query.

  But he managed to say, “Indeed.”

  “You enjoy this place, the parish work, children and so on?”

  “It is my life,” he said with a simple cliché that maddened the investigator.

  “Yes. We are deeply aware of that, of course. I suppose what I meant was have you made any friends?”

  Mulgrave hesitated. There was something not altogether conversational in the other’s tone, but his aspect was disinterested. He was easing his trouser legs over his bulging thighs with a fleshly relief. Mulgrave tried not to look.

  “Naturally,” he said at last. “Naturally.”

  “How long have you been here?” (He knew, the wily inquisitor.)

  “Ten years just about. Yes, ten this October. I have been here since Father Keefry died.”

  “Since then? A long time, really, in the one place in this heat. And no leave I suppose in all that time?”

  “Yes. Once. Five years ago. I had a quick trip home to see my parents.” (He remembered the dull dinners without emotion.) “We—they—are getting on.”

  “And your old friends, too, I suppose.” Greely lit a thoughtful cigarette. “Do you mind? I subscribe to a little mammon, you know. Only the teeniest of flesh-pots!”

  Mulgrave smiled tiredly. Flippancy as well as irony was beyond the periphery of his emotions. The spy is a solemn fellow and Mulgrave, though not willingly spy, was of a tediousness of moral concern that ploughed—it could only be called that—through good intentions and bad alike of his parishioners. The delicate flower of enthusiasm he could wither in a day with the dully persistent attention of his nurture. Greely was beginning to suspect something of this as he watched the other priest’s thick jaws appearing to chew over the question before he gave the answers.

  “Yes,” Greely said. And repeated the sigh of a word. Then he began to patter words as if he were thinking aloud. “I imagine lunch for the three of us a genuinely relaxing idea. Yes. Relaxing. And despite the heat, I am hungry, you know.”

  There was a terrible pause, one believing he had probed enough for the moment
, the other wondering what he should do and conscious of a need to be alert. There would be beer like a holy rain if he merely rang the small bell on the centre table. This was one simple miracle he performed at once. His pudgy left hand sought, lifted and shook.

  “Ah, yes. Ah, yes.” Greely let the spattering of sound exhaust itself. “I suppose you saw lots of old friends, when you were back in Adelaide. Boys and girls you’d been to school with.”

  “Well, not many. They are grown up and moved away. That bell was for beer by the way. But some. Yes. Some.”

  “Thank God!” Greely said. “The beer, I mean. A childhood sweetheart, aha?” he asked impishly, flicking the tip of his cigarette.

  The house boy had come in quietly and Greely inspected the elderly anxious face. There was nothing to find. “I remember I had a sweetheart when I was fifteen. She didn’t know but I wrote to her daily for at least a month and put the letters in envelopes that I never posted and then she shifted house or fell for a rugby full-back or something silly like that.” He sipped. Silence fell and prolonged itself. Beyond the wooden louvres the day was beginning to harden into noon. Lake could be heard slamming a cupboard door two rooms away. “Did you ever have a sweetheart, father?”

  Mulgrave blushed.

  “No.”

  “You were saving yourself for other things, eh?”

  “You might put it like that. I suppose.”

  “I think every man should taste the springs of—er—first romance. You know what you’re giving up, then, don’t you? After all, where’s the sacrifice if there’s no impulse in another direction, eh?”

  He stubbed his cigarette in three neat black dabs, leaving the bumper neatly on the edge of the tray. Along from them Father Lake sang suddenly in a melancholy baritone,

  “I know where I’m going.

  And I know who’s going wi’ me.”

  The fulsome crooning vibrato was muffled a little by pineboard but the irony came clearly through that barrier and lodged in the minds of the listeners. Their eyes had difficulty in accepting each other at this point and Mulgrave suggested uncomfortably that he should see about lunch. He was gone and Greely, tapping his fat waiting trapping fingers, pondered while time sweated out three minutes.

  There was a voice behind him then saying something he could not catch and, as he lumbered up and swung round, the words distinguished themselves.

  “I plead guilty.”

  Father Greely was extremely annoyed and bit his plump bottom lip with irritation.

  “How do you do? Are you Father Lake?”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” the other persisted through a fuzz of deliberate calm. “I said I plead guilty. Mea stupendissima culpa.”

  “It’s terribly hot, isn’t it?” Greely said. “I hope lunch won’t be long.”

  “Well, there’s nothing more to be said, is there? I mean you won’t get another remark from me except in the most general terms.”

  Greely stared at him. Their eyes did not swerve from guilt, if it was that, and discovery, for nearly sixty seconds.

  “Would you like to wash before lunch?” The social bathos then.

  “Thank you.”

  “That door along the veranda, second on your left.”

  Over the wash basin Greely mused on his consecrated hands lathering the soap with difficulty into bubbles. He rinsed off a great deal, slapped water on to his face a couple of times and dried himself on a towel piece hanging from a peg behind the door. It was frayed and the stripes had become shadows. It was all going to be, he suspected, much more difficult than to confront a denying and indignant guilt, a guilt that supplicates and bats its hands together and pleads, for this denotes in the confessor a presupposition of charity and a tendency to compassion.

  He was being denied.

  Lunch was an awkward series of food passings while the fan broke down and Mulgrave gasped or belched or looked down his nose and away or was in agony for having betrayed. He sat, a Judas figure, hunched over a slice of lime and papaw. Under his false breath he was praying forgive me forgive me with fanatic persistence while the two sparred.

  The meat. Then the salad. The lukewarm pudding.

  “Would you like coffee on the veranda?” Mulgrave inquired, smashing a silence and hoping for pardon. Greely hauled himself up to knock the salt shaker, nudge the sauce bottle and be, for the moment, perplexed. Had Mulgrave misrepresented from malice or envy or inadvertently tied a complex knot of accusation? Or was there further substantiation to be had? Master John Terope had complained to the Resident as well, for in his pocket Greely carried a copy of the letter Leslie Tucker-Brown had sent to the High Commission in Sydney. Its appalling contents had activated Deladier like a transfusion of moral obligation and his skinny flanks were moved to longer strides than they had ever taken.

  Greely’s fingers sought its flabby edges now and as he felt he said, “That would be agreeable. May I take off my coat?”

  Lake smiled on one side of his ginger face.

  “Wow!” he said. “What off-beat daring! Do you know, can you perceive, conceive, whatever it is anyway, that in the mid-summer days some of us whites get around stripped to the waist? Only, of course, where we cannot give scandal like, say, the sacristy, chancel, kitchen veranda, orchard—” He wanted badly to add “confessional” but did not quite dare. Out of his wretched blue eyes he looked sideways at the inquisitor who so far and with innate cunning had demanded nothing from Lake except the privilege of watching his disintegration.

  “The laundry—er—must be very expensive.”

  “Ah. For change daily boys,” Lake replied. “I personally live with my squalor. You know, father, I live so much with my inner and outer squalor in such intimacy as it were, I could almost be accused of incest as well.”

  Mulgrave fidgeted and fidgeted.

  “A time and a place,” he murmured. “A time and a place.”

  “Actually,” Father Lake insisted, “I use the poor-box money for my laundry. Mulgrave would have told you, wouldn’t you, Terry? Only I cook the books.”

  Greely repressed his annoyance and fiddled with the coffee crystals, a refinement in this place that he found ludicrous.

  “Sometimes” (oh, you persistent fellow, he inwardly accused himself) “I have been so desperate I have had to get shickered to cope. Brandy, father? Terry? And one evening—I’ve wanted to talk about this, because it’s rather rich, really, Greely—one evening coming past Landauer’s bakery, I was so tired and fed up and drunk—screaming drunk, not just your sad little one too many—I leant through the window and passed my hands above the underweight loaves and what do you think I did?”

  He waited. His eyes were full of something. It could have been tears of one kind or another.

  “I consecrated the lot.”

  No one looked up at the blasphemy. Greely coughed and gazed at the banana thicket where someone was moving in an intelligent and furtive way between light and shade, leaf cover and space. There were poetic antitheses of all kinds in glimpses of sleek brown skin, petulant face and a string bag lumpy with yellow fruit. Johnny Terope was on his way to the Tucker-Browns with offerings of a placatory nature. In that spasm of a second Mulgrave was seized with the vision of endless bread-rolls, starch-reduced, sliced, wholemeal, sacrosanct, passing out through the hot shuttered window counters of the Port Lena pure foods bakery into the shanty and thatch huts of Port Lena—and he wondered, even as he winced, at the real nature of this.

  “Intention,” said Greely. “You did not have the right intention. There has to be the impact of sacrifice. One must be offering within context. Anyway, are you confessing or boasting?”

  Lake smiled contentedly. Imagine having the real presence with peanut butter!

  “It’s the thought that counts! I’m all packed, you know, in anticipation and ready to climb on the first plane out. Actually I’m prepared to do more than that. I’m going back to chuck the lot.”

  Forced into discussion before he was ready,
Greely munched rather savagely at a broken fingernail before he ventured and then:

  “That has not yet been requested. You’re an extreme fellow, aren’t you, and presuming authority’s lack of charity?”

  “Do not, I prithee,” Lake said, “give me that damned crapulent spiel. In twenty years of ecclesiastic rule—in twenty years—I am a spry forty—I have never been conscious of great gouts of this substance falling as the gentle rain from heaven. Except for one man. Years ago. A small country town run by the masons and the Children of Mary sodality. He was a fine priest because he still retained his gentleness. He was good to animals and people in genuine distress. He did not mind sinners and he knew how to endure. Yes. Endure. He was such a practitioner, you know.”

  Explicably Lake began to sob into his sleeve, then his grimy linen handkerchief, and between his grubby heavings managed to stagger his body to the railing where he bent over to allow, so it felt, his eyes to drop into the geraniums and the melon creepers.

  Cups were clashed on saucers by the collapsed Mulgrave while Greely, overcome by himself, floundered across the veranda and almost gobbled the other man in his arms; so they stood rocking together in the horror and the heat and the shame until grief was shaken from one into the other.

  “Here,” Greely said unexpectedly. “Have a nip.” And he pulled from his trouser pocket a tiny silver flask. It had been a present from a bookie. “I use it for medicinal purposes. I am human too.”

  Lake walked away holding the flask as if its hard cold shape had not impressed itself on his hand nearly as thoroughly as the tones of understanding. Then he tipped the bottle to his lips.

  “Poor fellow. Poor fellow,” Greely murmured.

  “That’s true.” Lake’s lips shone with the whisky. “But I don’t want to pity myself, don’t you see? Up at the hospital there’s a young man with tropical lupus. He’s a—a suppurating mess, you understand? Where there isn’t pus there’s about to be. All one side of his face and along a shoulder. About a week ago I was passing through a ward near by and I heard this laughter. When I went in, there he was, doubled up over a comic. You wouldn’t think. When he laughed his face contorted like the most terrible nightmare. The stench. And round him were a couple of his pals. They’d come to visit. Their clean brown faces were crinkled up with pleasure too. He’d explained what it was about. I had to creep away. Us smooth old Christians aren’t used to such charity.”