A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  On the western ridge of the valley, convicts lived in huts and hovels and some in the caves that honeycombed the steep rocky side of the ridge, and between these improvised dwellings ran a complex of steep tracks. Near the top of the ridge was the last habitation, a cave with a flap of canvas hanging over its mouth. This was where Anne and I had always turned around and retraced our steps. The first time I walked with Mrs Brown and Hannaford, I led the way as far as the cave and then kept going as if it was our usual route. A convict woman pushed back the canvas and watched us pass.

  – Mrs Macarthur, Hannaford said, and I glanced back at him. Oh he knew, I could see. Sullivan must have told him. And did I see on Mrs Brown’s face, before it was hidden by her bonnet, surprise that Mrs Macarthur was leading the way beyond the permitted world?

  – Yes, Hannaford? I said, and watched him hesitate.

  – Begging your pardon, Mrs Macarthur, he said. It was nothing.

  I turned and went on up the track, with the innocent look of someone to whom it has not occurred that she may be disobeying her husband.

  At the top of the ridge, the damaged valley fell away behind us and the place opened out onto a broad platform of rock. As was never possible in the settlement, here we could see for many miles in all directions. To the east great fingers of land, furred with forest, lay across the path back out to the ocean, and to the west there was a panorama of unexplored peninsulas, islands, hills and valleys, with here and there the smudge of a fire telling of other lives, for which this land was not prison but home. Devon had never seen a sun such as this, slanting between the trees and laying their shadows down the steep slope, or this air, blowing in freely and making the bushes toss and the gulls wheel and cry.

  – Oh, Mrs Brown said. My word, that is…

  But did not try to finish the thought. I was not sure that the language had a word that could encompass such a place.

  From the great open platform on which we stood, the ground fell away towards the water, and a thin track bent around rocks and trees. Down there somewhere was the observatory where Mr Dawes the astronomer lived.

  I had no wish to venture down that track, but sat on a rock of a convenient height with a depression in it that was shaped perfectly for the human backside. Mrs Brown found another convenient seat, and Hannaford sat Edward down and the two of them began some quiet private play with twigs and leaves.

  Here, as never in the settlement, I knew that nothing more substantial than air separated me from home. It was over there, in the direction of north-north-west. Beyond this unknown continent, beyond that ocean we had traversed, Devon must still lie under the same sun and moon, as Mr Macarthur had enthused, that illuminated us here: the difference being that there the first frosts would be heavy on the grass, while here warm days were giving a foretaste of hot weather to come.

  If I were a bird like one of those soaring gulls, I could rise up and point my beak across all that wild land, all those tossing oceans, and glide down at last to perch on the gate of Grandfather’s yard, where I had made that row of mud-blobs as a child. Like a Musulman facing Mecca, I turned towards home, the place that held every good memory of the past and every hope for the future. With the sound of foreign leaves rattling together and foreign gulls crying, I willed myself to remember the gentle breezes of Devon, the rustle of oaks and beeches, the twitter and warble of the shy birds of the hedgerows. It was the place I knew in my bones. I yearned for it as a child might yearn for its mother.

  I had some superstitious feeling that if I told over the details of the place—the exact shape of the lane at Bond’s farm, the exact murmur of the quiet silver river coursing through the meadow at the bottom of Lodgeworthy, the exact smell of rich Devon earth turned over beneath the plough—then I would be rewarded by finding myself there again one day. If I neglected those memories and let them grow dim, my punishment would be never to see them again.

  It was as if I were inventing the idea of prayer, the comfort and need of it, from first principles.

  To come to the present was a shock like cold water. I was here in New South Wales, with my backside cold from sitting on a rock that turned out, after all, not to be made for human comfort.

  It seemed impossible to have any kind of conversation with Mrs Brown within the walls of the house, but out here I turned to her with the impulse to talk, one woman to another. Her cap had come off, she was holding it in her hand, and strands of hair danced around her head. She stood gazing out into the radiance of the afternoon, her face softened into something more like a smile than I had yet seen. Out here in this wild gusty place she was quite unlike the woman who was always so shrunken.

  – A glorious aspect, outlook, I said, stumbling and awkward with her. And how pleasant to be here taking the air.

  – Oh yes, she said.

  Then remembered.

  – Mrs Macarthur, she added.

  She put her cap back on and tucked in the strands of hair and I saw that my comment might have sounded like a reproach for her idleness. Her brow creased with the endless anxiety of the person whose time did not belong to her. Which I remembered, with a shaft of pain like a toothache, from those years at the vicarage.

  I wanted to unravel our exchange and knit it up into a different shape.

  – We are far from home, Mrs Brown, I said. You and I both.

  Then realised this might appear to be the prelude to asking her how she came to be so far from home, and down that road I had no wish to force her. I hurried on.

  – Where I was a child beside the Tamar, my father was thought to be on a mighty journey if he had to travel as far as Exeter, I said.

  Saw that I had not left the thought behind at all, and went on again.

  – He was a farmer, I said. Though he died when I was a child.

  – Oh, she said. And if I may ask, Mrs Macarthur, where was the farm? Only my own father was also a farmer, in a small way of course. And died, as yours did. We were out of Whitstone two mile.

  – Whitstone! I exclaimed. I went there with Grandfather, he bought a pig there. We were in Bridgerule, not so far away.

  A silence fell while perhaps we both considered the possibility that as girls in pinafores we might have passed each other on the streets of Whitstone.

  I guessed that her father’s death had left her at life’s mercy, as the death of mine could so easily have done. It was nothing more than chance that I had been protected by a loving grandfather, a playmate at the vicarage, and a parson generous enough to make sure that a Midsummer Night’s mistake got patched up into a marriage. She had lacked those protections, I guessed, and a few harsh strokes from malign fortune had ended with her being a prisoner in a foreign land.

  The unasked question hung between us.

  – I am not a thief, Mrs Macarthur, she said.

  Then frowned.

  – No, I am a thief. That is, I was a thief…

  She stopped.

  – Yes, I thieved, she said at last.

  She spoke like a person who in the gloomy reaches of sleepless nights told over the words she had to own, so that repetition might make a callus on the place that hurt.

  – I thieved, that makes me a thief.

  She was as disdainful as any judge.

  – But I am no thief here, she said. I do assure you of that, Mrs Macarthur.

  I could hear her breathing rather emphatically, and realised she was holding back tears. I wanted to touch her, but would not presume.

  – Mrs Brown, let us put it that you were a thief, once upon a time, I said. But now you are simply a woman on a distant shore, where Christmas comes in summer, and other unexpected things may come to pass as well.

  I was trying for a light tone to ease her through the moment, but was surprised at the words, springing out of some deep place in myself, where hope must live. I had hardened myself never to think about the shocking folly that had brought me here, the night of bonfire and darkness that was the start of everything else. I had shrunk my
thoughts to nothing more than the present, the survival through one minute, then the next, so as not to see the large view of my life. Yet here were these words about other unexpected things may come to pass springing out of my mouth.

  Mrs Brown heard it, the tremor of some greater meaning in the words, and met my eye, and for a space of time we were simply two women standing together in a great plain space swept by clean wind, eye to eye, sharing something without being able to put a precise name on that thing.

  That expanse of rock, open like an eye to the sky, became the destination for all our walks through that first spring. Somehow it never became necessary to explain to Mr Macarthur exactly where his wife and son and servants went every afternoon as they paced away from the house.

  UNDER THE THUMB

  Edward enjoyed our excursions as much as I did, for Hannaford knew how to play the kind of games that a boy of a year and a half enjoyed. Loved especially to be borne along astride Hannaford’s shoulders, then swung down with a great swooping when we reached the open rock.

  At home he suffered under the thumb of his father. With Mr Macarthur there was no indulgence. No weakness was to be shown and no complaint made. None of that! was what Edward heard from his father, crisp and snappy like a whip, if he grizzled to be carried, or took a tumble. None of that, my boy!

  Yet he loved his son, after his own fashion. Called him Ned, his own soft name for the lad. And I had seen him watching the child sleep, with a look on his face I never saw at other times, a kind of mournful tenderness.

  Tenderness, because Mr Macarthur was no monster, but a creature like any other, for whom love of one’s children was as fundamental as breathing. Mournful, because, being sent away so young, he had never learned that a father could be as strict as required, while also being tender.

  I surprised a softness, almost a pity, for this armoured man, when I watched him bending over the cot.

  THE BEST KIND OF BROTHER

  Nearly three years after the landing of Captain Phillip and his reluctant colonists, New South Wales was still nothing more than two specks that were Britain among the numberless miles that were not. One of those specks was the township at the head of Sydney Cove. The other, some fifteen miles inland, was called by the native name of Parramatta. Its better soil made it the centre of such agriculture as could be given the name. Convicts had been sent there to farm, and a barracks set up to keep order. There was a second house for the governor, and plans for streets to be laid out.

  It was our good fortune that Captain Nepean had been sent for a time to supervise that settlement. After the first weeks of awkward encounters in Sydney, it had been a relief to know that he was fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles from me, and more to the point from Mr Macarthur. I had not forgotten the pages of notes my husband had made on board the Neptune, but I hoped most sincerely that he had.

  When he heard Nepean was to be sent to Parramatta, Mr Macarthur gloated. He had been obliged to take his turn there, but had argued that his family needed him in Sydney, and his stay there had been brief. Among the officers there was a kind of shame in being obliged to do duty at the inland settlement. It was regarded as the province of a province, a place for men to rusticate who had no ambition, no sense of larger prospects: an antipodean Gibraltar.

  But one night during that first spring he burst in to where I was sitting by a small fire, lit more for company than warmth. He was barely in the door before he was sharing his mighty rage, the angle of his head and shoulders caught in a peculiar tension, as if he were straining against a high wind.

  – Now the knave is slandering me, he exclaimed. Back here in Sydney, and putting it about that I eavesdropped on him and Trail—actually listening at the door like a bootboy!

  He was at the table in the corner, scuffling through papers, now turned with a sheaf of them in his hand.

  – Look! Look here! I have it all, every lying word!

  The papers from the Neptune, not forgotten as I had hoped. Oh, why did I not burn them? A chance gone that would not come again. Ten months had passed since the events on board, but the flame was redoubled by whatever troublemaker had reported Nepean’s slander.

  – But sir, I said, the events are in the past. A page has been turned. Much water has flowed under the bridge. What is to be gained now by telling over what is dead and buried?

  I was treading in place, hoping enough tired figures of speech going on for long enough would dull my husband’s rage.

  – Oh, what is to be gained? You ask what gained?

  His glare could have burned through brick.

  – Oh, nothing, my dearest. Only my good name. My honour. Only such an insignificant bagatelle as that, my dear wife!

  I had never been afraid of Mr Macarthur, but his savage tone silenced me.

  – He must be brought to justice, he shouted. Let His Majesty see what lying dog is taking his shilling!

  He shook the sheaf of papers at me.

  – Look, I have it all here! What he said, what he did! Proof positive!

  Separated a page and thrust it at me: I saw the words monstrous and unprovoked before he snatched it back and pulled out another.

  – Look! Look what he said to me, and look here, my reply!

  Verbatim! Noted at the time! You, my dear, can bear witness that I made a record at the time, you would remember that! If asked in court, you could swear to it!

  A kind of congealing came over me.

  – Bear witness, I said. But Mr Macarthur, I was not there, I did not see.

  This was the wrong tack.

  – So you will take his side! My own wife, betraying me!

  – Not betraying you, no!

  But there was no joy to be got in trying to deny something I had never said.

  – In court, I said. So the officers—they would sit in judgment?

  – No! No!

  Mr Macarthur was smiling now, a rictus of glee.

  – Not here, my dearest. No court martial could be enacted here against Nepean. None of these weaklings would find him guilty, no matter what the evidence.

  He was calm now, saw a plain path ahead of him and, at the end of it, a destination he liked the look of.

  – A court martial would not take place here, he said. It would, of necessity, take place at home.

  To have come all this way, through such suffering, to turn around and go back after such a short time? On a fool’s errand, Mr Macarthur laughed out of court? And where to then, for all of us, with his prospects in tatters?

  Be steady, I reminded myself. Be cool.

  – But Mr Macarthur, I said, very steady, very cool, you will not have forgotten that Mr Nepean’s brother could ruin you at a stroke of the pen?

  He said nothing. Ah, I had struck a nerve.

  – And do not forget, I went on, that Nepean may also have made a record of what went on. Bring his own witness. Mr Trail, for instance.

  Well done, I thought, and took a breath for my next argument, but Mr Macarthur was ahead of me.

  – A damned liar, he shouted. A pack of damned lies! I would be the worst kind of coward if I let them go unchallenged!

  The words rang around the room. He struck a fist into a palm and strode from the fireplace to the table and back again, the blood high in his cheeks. I imagined Sullivan and Hannaford in their lean-to at the back, and Mrs Brown on her pallet in the kitchen, listening. Perhaps sniggering. I could imagine it of Sullivan. Could picture him later, regaling others with imitations of Lieutenant Macarthur’s rage.

  The evening was bursting out of the safe place where a husband made grand threats heard only by his wife. In the vibrating silence after the shouting, the thing was tipping into the irrevocable.

  It was out of despair, not cunning, that I met his fury with my own.

  – Oh yes, I said with savage irony. Oh, Mr Macarthur, how right you are!

  What bliss to surrender, to let hot unconsidered rage sweep reason away.

  – Naturally a man of honour could
do no less!

  Now I was shouting too. Let them hear! What did it matter, now that we were set on this course to disaster?

  He shot me a sharp look and I thought he might turn on me, and in my reckless ecstasy I would almost have welcomed a blow rather than this dance of words. But he had heard no mockery. He was silent, staring into the fire. He leaned forward in his chair, moved a foot, pursed up his mouth.

  Something had shifted in the room. In borrowing his own wildness and displaying it back to him, I had accidently hit on a way to make a pause in its headlong flight.

  Outwit, outwait, match his cunning with your own.

  – Do not delay, Mr Macarthur, I said. Go to the governor tomorrow, in the morning.

  He blinked as if surprised. As well he might be.

  – The governor’s sense of justice will of course make him put aside his friendship with Nepean’s brother!

  Mr Macarthur cleared his throat as if about to speak. But he said nothing, only picked up the poker and rattled it around in the fire. A piece of wood burst into flame and lit up his face so I could see his thrust-out bottom lip very prominent as he considered. Stop now, I told myself. The crackle of the fire, taking new heart from its rearrangement, was the only sound.

  I began to find the quiet unbearable and pretended to have heard Edward calling out. Went in to him, sleeping soundly with both hands flung up beside his ears. I stood over him watching and listening. The house held its breath: the air in the rooms, the servants, the wife, the infant, all waiting.

  When I returned to the other room, Mr Macarthur was warming his backside at the fire.

  – Well, time we were in bed, my dear, he said, as easy and calm as if he had not, ten minutes earlier, been shouting loud enough to be heard by the whole household.

  He went out of the room and as I followed him I glanced at the table. The papers on which he had enumerated every inflammatory detail of what had taken place on the Neptune had been gathered together and folded over themselves, the fold flattened under a book. Not put away, not exactly hidden, but set aside.