Wanting

by Richard Flanagan

  There were scabbards without swords, compasses without needles, even an astrolabe with a bent alidade, along with several newspapers written in a strange, unreadable script, which Mrs Dellacorte said was Hungarian. She claimed these recorded her husband’s feats of arms in several forgotten wars. All this was shown to any guest she considered of consequence, to establish herself as a woman of position as well as passion. The relics were, however, out of bounds to everyone else.

  Whatever transaction passed between the orphanage and the seamstress, who was meant to provide for Mathinna until she was eighteen, none passed between the seamstress and Mathinna. She scrounged scraps and stole drinks and, receiving no pay, took to getting pennies and bread for what Sir John had stolen. She set no store by it. It wasn’t pleasant—but then, what in her life was? It was the Devil’s world, after all. She even sometimes took an odd comfort in it: it can be no worse than this, she would tell herself as they slobbered and grunted and shoved.

  But it could, and the worst was when the memories crowded together, of her people, their kindnesses, their laughter, the singing and dancing around the campfire. In between, she went to the Queen’s Domain, where she caught green and red rosella parrots and sold them to those who liked eating them in pies.

  She noticed a weeping between her legs and a general itching. She realised she had the pox. Since just about everyone else she knew did too, it seemed as unremarkable, if as annoying and occasionally painful, as the lice that also beset her. A friend gave her a phial of quicksilver to drink. She vomited, her nails all fell out, and after a time the weeping and itching disappeared.

  Mostly she longed for sleep and its sweet oblivion. The moment she reached her cot and found her way under a possum-skin rug, she felt safe.

  One night a very tall, very skinny old man in a splendid coat came into the widow’s back room. He had, another girl told Mathinna, made his money speculating, using a small inheritance to buy a half-share in a whaling expedition that had multiplied into several whaling ships. On seeing her, he smiled. He had only talked to her for a few minutes before she insisted that if he wanted her, he would have to pay like the other men. His smile halted, and he opened his bony fingers to reveal the incomprehensible sight of a guinea coin.

  It was a night of sleet, and they went not to her normal workplace, a stall left empty for the purpose in the stables, but stole into Mrs Dellacorte’s slightly less chill parlour of sacred memory. But when Mathinna went to pull her skirts up, he halted her, sat her down, and gave her another guinea coin, along with a question.

  ‘Miss Mathinna—do you not remember me?’

  Only when he fished out a button accordion from his saddle bag did she recognise him. It was Mr Francis Lazaretto. As he played The Ballad of the Cyprus Brig, his voice captured her one last time. When he slowed the song, and strange, sad, sweet sounds came from that battered little bellows, she span this way and that in slow evocation of the joyful dancing his music had once inspired in her. When he went to leave, he spoke just one sentence that meant nothing to her.

  ‘More forms of consummation than one.’

  And at that moment the door opened, and in strode a panting black pug, long tongue lolling, followed by Mrs Dellacorte. She took just one look at the black girl sitting on the billiard table who had so obviously profaned her most precious shrine, and as Mathinna scampered out behind Francis Lazaretto, Mrs Dellacorte told her not to bother coming back.

  While riding in his carriage to a meeting with Pedder to discuss an enticing business proposal—a large pastoral run in the burgeoning new colony of Port Phillip—Montague saw a young Aboriginal woman staggering towards him.

  ‘I hardly recognised her, she was that changed—and none of it for the better,’ Montague later told Pedder. He had suffered a stroke. One side of his mouth drooped with a palsy and his words slurred. ‘Her face was bloated and bleeding from some thrashing or fall, while her body seemed all sticks.’

  ‘I’m told she wanders the town, drinking in the gutters,’ Pedder replied.

  ‘I pulled the carriage blind down, just so,’ said Montague—here he leant forward and pretended to be spying out a narrow strip of glass—‘well, you understand.’ They laughed at the idea of the wretch embarrassing him. ‘But here was the queerest thing—she spotted me and just smiled! Can you believe it? It was as though everything for her was utterly real and at the same time without any foundation—including me!—and somehow this seemed to keep her, who is constantly humiliated, jeered at by any who see her, who I am told routinely has mud or stones hurled at her, in this smiling state of some deranged superiority.’

  ‘I have seen it myself,’ said Pedder. ‘She roams the streets as if it were all a dream.’

  But something about Mathinna’s fall and the way she now deported herself troubled both men. It was hard to know whether her seeming acceptance was submission or simple-mindedness or the most profound revolt, a contempt greater than any visited on her by pox-raddled redcoats, shepherds or ticket-of-leave men.

  ‘She was many things,’ said Montague, lost with his own thoughts. ‘She was never simple-minded.’ An exclamation mark of drool fell from his lip.

  At times Mathinna could seem naturally haughty, as if her peculiar history had indeed bequeathed that very majesty she had once been promised, as though from her full height of five foot four she had seen everything there was of people and somehow now stood above them, aware of their failings but without judgement. Some in Hobart Town regarded it as nigger stupidity, others as arrogance; some said it was just the grog, others recalled older tales of her witchery. She was easily reviled, laughed at and sometimes spat upon, but the thought of her played uneasily on people’s minds.

  She continued trading her body, because, along with a little writing and the quadrille, it was what she had learnt and finally come to understand as her only possibility for survival. Loathsome as Mrs Dellacorte’s establishment had been, it had offered a dry cot and palliasse, a fire, and even if the food was bad, there was always enough of it, and the worst men were thrown out if they roughed up a girl.

  Now the sailors and old lags and soldiers took her ever more drunkenly, hopelessly, violently, painfully, in anger and with tears, with their rotten broken mouths and foul breath tonguing hate and begging forgiveness, rarely curious and generally desperate to be rid of her the moment they were done. That, if little else, suited her.

  Besides, she understood that what she sold was not herself but a shell, from which at some point she would be freed. A few knew her story, or enough to taunt her, but they never understood that it was not her they were abusing with their vile words and rough fingers and abject bodies, because she was not there in that odd jumble and tug and hitch of two bodies in a muddy lane or the bush behind the town.

  ‘She was the Governor’s pet piccaninny princess, you know, all pearly smile and tarry flashness,’ she heard a voice say one dark evening as she staggered up Cat and Fiddle Lane. ‘But now she’s lost her looks.’

  ‘Grown into them, more like it,’ said a second voice, reedy and wretched. ‘She’s just another black ape now.’

  Realising they were standing just around the corner, Mathinna halted.

  ‘A Chartist, more like it,’ laughed the first voice. ‘There for all.’

  Though Mathinna did not understand exactly what was meant by this conversation, she understood it was something she could not even shape into thought: that, with those words, something undeniable had been denied her.

  ‘Jesus, he bleed like a blackfella,’ she said later that night, to a sawyer taking her too roughly from behind.

  ‘God’s free,’ he said. ‘You’re not.’

  Nor was she, but her price was quickly dropping. Her hair was coming out in so many hanks she tied what remained of her red scarf around it, most of her teeth had gone or were going, and her skin was scabby. She traded her raddled flesh for johannas, mohurs, rupees, pieces of Spanish dollars, cartwheel pennies and Degraves’ de
spised Tassie shillings when she was lucky, and for pieces of pickled pork and long swigs of whatever when she was desperate. Sometimes that was several times a night out the back of various grog shops, occasionally it was bartered quickly off the track that led from Hobart Town through the hills and down D’Entrecasteaux Channel to Oyster Cove, where the handful of survivors of Wybalenna, with whom she spent more and more of her time, were now interred.

  She stopped trapping birds. She drank more. It was apparent to her—albeit in a dull and confused way that she found beyond any words she knew, either of her own tongue or of English—that other people seemed to revel and delight with purpose in this life and this world. Ma’am existed for a reason, for hundreds of reasons with names like Education, Advancement, Civilisation. The convicts longed to escape, the soldiers to become settlers, the settlers to make more money. Even the old people at Oyster Cove held the hope of return to the land and the ancestors, if not in this life then in the next.

  Mathinna yearned for some similar fire to live by, but in the meantime made do with what helped her endure, with what enabled her to survive. Mostly that was drink. Sometimes she still held her hands over her eyes and looked for the cracks of light. But less and less. More and more she drank towards the darkness.

  George Augustus Robinson called in to Oyster Cove on his way home to England, to say a final farewell to what remained of those he had protected. He was mystified that they had little to say to him, and there was no excitement at his visit. He had been particularly interested to meet with Mathinna and see what had become of the experiment of the black princess, but all he met with were sorry rumours.

  He reflected on the strangeness of this final meeting many years later in the town of Bath, to which he had retired, as he closed a large trunk full of his assembled papers detailing his strange history of encounters with the savages of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land. Robinson had hoped to make something of them—a book, celebrity, honours, money. That most elusive accolade, greatness. No one was interested. Nor, ultimately, he had discovered, was he. His major cause for regret was not holding out for more money when he brought in the last of the natives. Money, money, money, and what money can make of life!

  His ambitions, like his body, were collapsing. He found balance difficult. He hoped for a brass plaque to be attached to his house after his death. He was no longer sure how best to lobby for, or even obliquely suggest, such an honour on the ever-rarer occasions he met the few who paraded themselves as powerful in the old Regency spa town. What was he commemorating? His thoughts were mist. He heard strange chanting. Saw a naked man dancing between the stars and the earth. Remembered rivers, a dark child at his door, fingers greasy with sawing. He awoke early on the eighteenth of October 1866 and, rolling his head to one side in his warm bed, he looked at an autumnal light, red and diffuse, softly falling through a window. He felt a great serenity wash over him, his body peacefully stretched out, and, secure in the knowledge he had been a good man who had helped many others, he died.

  12

  SEATS FOR THE FINAL NIGHT were impossible to procure. People who had come by train from as far away as London were begging ticket touts for pity. Lady Jane had been luckier. After she missed seeing the play in London because of fundraising engagements elsewhere, she had been delighted to receive an invitation for that evening’s performance, along with a delightful letter, from Mr Dickens himself.

  Travelling into the heart of Manchester that uncharacteristically hot August morning felt to Lady Jane like descending into the cone of Vesuvius. The light was ochre and the sweaty air tasted of sulphur; iron horseshoes and the iron wheels of omnibuses, coaches, wagons and drays were thundering all around her, a cacophony of noise like ten thousand smithies. And like a spectator on a volcano, she was enjoying these marvellous sensations of a most modern city when her landau carriage, taking a side road to avoid the flyblown corpse of a horse, became caught up in a funeral cortege.

  She travelled the world now, her vengeance on her husband’s obstinacy applauded as noble grief, her part as loyal widow having emancipated her from men and allowing her freedoms few other women could imagine. Her life, as a studied melancholy, she savoured. To admit to happiness would have been inappropriate, but as her cursing driver sought a way around, she believed herself to be fulfilled.

  Craning her head, she could see it was a child’s hearse, half-sized, white-painted, brass-railed and white ostrich feather-plumed. Inside lay a toy-sized coffin. Water from the melting ice packed beneath that small, sad box dripped down the hearse’s jolting rear. As those beads of water splashed on the street’s hot cobbles, vanishing into steam, Lady Jane found her pleasant thoughts evaporating.

  ‘Faster,’ she yelled to the landau’s driver. ‘Get me there faster.’

  At the Grand Western Hotel, Ellen Ternan’s spirits were also not what they had been. All day she had the sense Dickens was avoiding her. She worried that she had lost his respect, she cursed herself for becoming too familiar. Meanwhile Maria Ternan had woken unwell, and by the afternoon her cold was so bad her voice had gone. Against this loss Maria could do nothing, and it was clear that she would not be able to perform that night as Wardour’s love, Clara Burnham.

  An hour and a half before the curtain went up, Ellen Ternan received a terse note from Dickens saying Mr Hueffer had found a local actress to fill her role, freeing her to take her sister’s place in the lead. She burst into tears, not knowing whether it was from relief or terror, or both.

  Though each evening had seen an ever more extraordinary performance from Dickens, even the cast were unprepared for the intensity and emotion of Dickens’ acting that final evening.

  ‘It’s as though it’s no longer a play, but life itself,’ said Wilkie to Forster, as they waited in the wings for their calls.

  ‘I’m simply glad the folly’s finishing,’ replied Forster, without turning. ‘If this goes on any longer, he’ll end up more lost than Sir John.’

  Seated in the best box in the house, Lady Jane gasped in shock with the rest of the audience when, in the concluding act, Dickens made his last appearance as the dying Wardour. She had to raise a cologne-scented handkerchief to her nose, for the stench of sweaty wool and animal odour rising from the heated crowd below seemed to worsen with each sensational development in the play. He had become a terrible being, eyes glaring like a wild animal’s, long grey hair and beard matted, his clothes no more than piteous rags.

  ‘Who is it you want to find?’ asked Ellen Ternan. ‘Your wife?’

  Dickens shook his head wildly.

  ‘Who, then? What is she like?’

  On stage, Dickens was allowed finally to stare into her eyes, to take in her cheeks, her nose, her lips, and he could not stop staring. Little by little, the hoarse, hollow voice he affected for the part softened.

  ‘Young,’ he said, ‘with a fair, sad face, with kind tender eyes. Young and loving and merciful,’ he now cried out, not to the audience but to Ellen Ternan, his voice no longer Wardour’s but strangely his own. ‘I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, homeless—till I find her! Over the ice and snow, tramping over the land, awake all night, awake all day, wander till I find her!’

  Lady Jane, looking down from her box, was thinking how, like Clara Burnham, she had demonstrated the purity and virtue of her love. Yet far from making her feel vindicated with her life, instead of thinking nobly of Sir John, the play was taking her back to those final years in Van Diemen’s Land. There was such a wrongness about something, such a terrible wrongness, that she feared she might scream.

  Dickens turned and sensed the huge audience out there in the darkness. Wardour had ceased to exist and was drifting away with the steam rising from his hot body. Yet he felt the heat of the crowd wanting something more. Though he did not know what it was, he knew he would keep giving it to them until there was nothing left and only death remained, death that had chased him he
re, death that was eating him even there on the stage. He suddenly fell to the floor—the audience gasped, someone shrieked in horror. Ellen Ternan knelt down and gently rolled his head into her lap.

  He could feel her thighs beneath his neck as she cradled him, he could feel the white light envelop them at last as she wrapped him in her arms, and he wanted to stay that way, in her arms and in that light, forever.

  Watching through his thick spectacles, Wilkie found himself not simply moved, but astonished as Wardour, now dying in Clara Burnham’s arms, finally recognises her as his long-lost love, for whom he has sacrificed everything so that her love, Frank Aldersley, might live. Wilkie had never witnessed anything like it in his life.

  Ellen Ternan was looking at Dickens, shaking her head, biting her lips; and, to his amazement, Wilkie could see that she was weeping, not stage tears, but a heartfelt sobbing. In the rows, scores of people were weeping with her. Handkerchief clasped tightly to her face, Lady Jane, too, felt the emotion rising in her as an inexorable panic. Far below, she saw, as if through water, a murky orphanage courtyard and, standing alone within it, a bedraggled child staring back at her.

  ‘You,’ said Dickens, shakily.

  Lady Jane was leaning down, the audience was coming forward, all craning to better watch and hear. They were like a living being, a single animal, waiting, ready. Dickens realised he was no longer speaking to a script, but that the script was—improbably, inexorably, inescapably—describing his soul.

  ‘You,’ he said again, this time louder, for he wanted to fill his mouth with her, he wanted to lose himself in Ellen Ternan’s breasts, to bury himself in her belly, to bite her thighs, to be rid of all that being still and alone made him fear. He was panting. His terror was absolute. He was shaking violently, his voice trembling, his words now revelations to him. ‘It was always you!’