A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  – I could say, my dear Mrs M, that I contemplate our departure with mingled sensations, he said. But the fact is that I hail it with nothing but rapture.

  I watched him hear how this made a lie of all his earlier yearnings and hankerings.

  – Other than my parting from you, dear lady, naturally! That is a true grief. A person for whom I entertain such deep affection, and whose exquisite presence will always burn bright in my memory and my heart.

  This might have sounded overwrought even to his ear and, perhaps to make it seem authentic, he asked me for a keepsake. He picked up a piece of ribbon that had come loose from my hat and was lying on the windowsill waiting to be sewn back on, clearly the thing he had in mind. But I did not want Captain Tench taking that bit of ribbon away, keeping it in his breast pocket and making a story out of it. Oh, yes, I was given this by a lady very dear to me, I could imagine him telling someone. Very dear. Very close to my heart. I ignored his hints and presented him instead with nothing more intimate than a handful of sweet tea in a twist of paper.

  Mr Dawes might have stayed, as a few of the other marines were doing, but had been ordered by the governor to return to England. He had been involved in some act of insubordination, Mr Macarthur told me, something to do with a punitive expedition that had been mounted against the Botany Bay tribe. He was being sent home in high-minded honourable disgrace. According to Mr Macarthur, he was to face court martial.

  No one had ever questioned the ending of the lessons in botany and astronomy. Captain Tench had been too busy making eyes at me, and Mr Macarthur was glad to be spared any more lectures on Papilionaceae. I had encountered Mr Dawes on a few occasions in the township since our time together, but we bowed to each other and walked on without meeting each other’s eyes.

  By the time the departure of the Gorgon was announced, I was almost certain that I was with child. I did the arithmetic of the months, then did it again and then once more, but always with the same result: Mr Dawes could not be the child’s father. I was grateful for the certainty. Watching the child for traces of the man would have been too painful a pleasure. Certainty was harsh, but it was the truth.

  Mr Dawes was obliged to come to the salon for the farewell gathering Tench insisted on, but the two of us performed an unhappy dance of avoidance, moving around the room so that others were always between us. Tench tried to cheer what was a rather strained afternoon. Raised his cup as he had done so often and proposed the toast: To His Majesty! And then: To Home!

  I should have envied the marines, for whom the toast would soon be a reality, but in truth the picture of Home had become a little stale. I could no longer imagine the house, the land, myself in a striped pinny. There was nothing but a blur of rain and fog.

  To Home! I exclaimed with the rest, but the word rang strangely in my ears.

  Mr Dawes sent a messenger to the house with the orrery, carefully wedged in a box, and with a stiff note—written with a consciousness that it could be read by other eyes—hoping that I would continue my studies. The orrery, humble and half-broken though it was, became precious, a reminder of the best of myself. I have it still.

  LOW, VERY LOW

  Bridie had written to me, with what might have been a hint that she had read between the lines of mine. Told me she had always thought Mr Macarthur would make an excellent husband, if he met with a woman whose disposition and accomplishments suited him. Thank you, dear friend, I thought, for this gossamer tissue, transparent only to my eyes, behind which you tell me that you understand.

  Now, on the eve of the marines’ departure, my feelings could not be contained as I composed a letter back to her. My letter would travel to England on the Gorgon, Mr Dawes and the letter on the same ship, both carrying a little of myself away with them.

  My spirits are at this time low, very low, I wrote. Tomorrow we lose some valuable members of our small society and some very good friends endeared to us by acts of kindness and friendship. I remember the bleakness I felt, the conviction that nothing would ever be different. Reckless in my despair, I let my pen go on. From this you may be led to question my happiness. For God’s sake, question! I hungered to be heard, to share, for once, my true feelings.

  Seeing them bald on the page I knew how dangerous those words were. I had to take them by the hand and lead them back to safety. But this much I can with truth add for myself, that since I had had the powers of reason and reflection I never was more sincerely happy than at this time. Oh, you poor dear woman, postponing, by one unnecessary phrase or another, the moment at which the lie would have to be told. Sincerely told.

  A flicker of truth insisted on being heard again. It is true I have some wishes unaccomplished. I watched myself straining to keep the balance between revealing and concealing. When I consider this is not a state of perfection I am abundantly content. Yes, relative to death or dismemberment I was of course content. Abundantly content.

  I see that, contrary to my usual practice, I have underlined many words. Sincerely is emphasised with a somewhat wavering line, and in the phrase than at this time each word sits on its own dab of ink. Perfection has four, as if to spell out the word in firm syllables. Abundantly and content are both bolstered with a strong line. My nib paused with a thickening of ink at the end of each underlining, as if I did not trust the words to do the hard job of persuading.

  GORGON

  All that morning I was aware of the Gorgon in the cove, rocking on the water, ready to turn its bow to the east into the vastness of the ocean. I had determined not to watch it sail away, but half an hour before it was due to raise anchor I left the house and hurried down to the cove. To the accompaniment of ragged huzzas and a blast of disorganised noise from fifes and drums, the last few marines were being piped on board. The anchor was being raised, I could hear the sailors’ song as they ground the capstan around, and the rattle as the sails were set. The ship was too far away for faces to be made out, but as it slowly got under way I waved my handkerchief, watching a few white specks on board flickering in reply.

  As the ship disappeared and there was no longer any point in waving, I looked across the cove and saw a figure at the foot of the headland where Mr Dawes had lived. She was up to her knees in the water, gazing at the ship: Patyegarang. It was too far to be sure, and yet I was sure. She was not waving, but fixing a beam of attention on the ship as if sending a message by the sheer power of feeling.

  Captain Tench had told me that Mr Dawes was hoping to return. Sell his commission, apply to emigrate as a schoolteacher, something along those lines. Certainly the place could have done with a teacher of his abilities. Why none of that eventuated, I do not know. Only that I have never seen him since and do not expect to, though few days pass when I do not think of him.

  THE EVENING STAR

  What Mr Dawes and I had shared was not like the love that triumphs at the end of novels, with a great complacent silence after the last page. Let me be truthful. We were like any other humans, fumbling for the sense of each other’s selves through clouds of obscurity. There were great shadowed masses of me that he would never know, and of him that I would never know.

  Just the same, Mr Dawes, how much—oh, how much!—I would like to sit with you on that rock by the water one more time, watching the evening star, its brightness by the moment announcing, like a bell tolling, that it was time to return to the complicated and dangerous business of being the wife of John Macarthur, Esquire.

  PART FIVE

  PUBLIC WORKS

  The long game tested even Mr Macarthur’s patience, for the governor went on resisting all pressure to grant land to the officers of the New South Wales Corps. But a year after the marines sailed home he followed them. No new governor had yet arrived, and until then the role would be filled by Mr Macarthur’s greatest admirer, Major Grose the Dear Dunce.

  It was not a matter of the long game now, but of speed. The new governor might arrive at any time, and overnight the DD’s power would evaporate. The Auld Salt�
�s ship was barely out of sight when the DD signed the paper Mr Macarthur had been pressing so relentlessly for: a grant for the chosen hundred acres at Parramatta, plus convicts to work it. At one stroke of a compliant pen, Mr Macarthur had what might have taken him a lifetime to achieve back in England.

  But the difference between Mr Macarthur and other ambitious men in the colony was that, as soon as one of his ambitions was realised, another formed.

  – The ink was barely dry on the grant, he said. He was still blotting his signature when I played my next card. The idle fellow did not take much convincing that a man was needed to take into his own hands all the pettifogging details of his new position. Inspector of Public Works was the title I suggested.

  What would Mr Macarthur have done without a wifely audience to nod agreeably at his triumphs?

  – He leapt at the idea, he said. Saw himself free to lie on his sofa all day—I saw his eyes go to the cushions. Until with a grand show of grief I mentioned how unfortunate it was that the post could not be remunerated without sanction from Whitehall. Poor fellow, all was woe-is-me!

  Mr Macarthur had not forgotten how to mimic another man’s weakness. There to the life was the poor major, his face furrowed like a bloodhound’s in deepest dismay.

  – Then, with becoming diffidence, I offered myself for the post.

  – Without payment, I said. Then what is the advantage?

  It was like a game of shuttlecock: he lobbed me the shuttle and was waiting as I lobbed it back.

  – My dear, he said. My dear clever wife.

  He was taking his time, enjoying himself.

  – Whitehall cannot refuse once the work is being done, he said. The post will be handsomely remunerated in due course. But it is not a matter of the money. Can you, my dear, name a single action in this place that does not come under the heading of a public work? Any permission to own, or clear, or build, or assign, or reward, or punish?

  He was right, I could not name one.

  – Governors may come and governors may go, he said. But the Inspector of Public Works is a fixture beyond the reach of their whims.

  The Inspector of Public Works lost no time in assigning himself ten, then twenty, then thirty convicts victualled by His Majesty, and set them to work clearing and planting his land. The Inspector of Public Works was also in a position to allocate bricks and timber towards his own farmhouse. Six months after the governor sailed away, enough land had been cleared for a promising crop of corn to be growing. Six months more and the house was ready to live in.

  By then I had been safely delivered of a daughter. Like her brother she was a sickly babe, and for many months I feared my second daughter would go the way of my first. I held her to me as I had held Jane, this time without hope. I could not bear to hope again, was reconciled to this one making her little whimperings, puckering her little mouth, and fading as the other had done. But she clung to life. Every day there was the surprise of her continuing to breathe, and her stillness was more like a person husbanding her few resources than someone easing her way into the hereafter.

  Mr Macarthur insisted that she was named Elizabeth. I would have chosen a different name. She was herself, not a copy of her mother. But Mr Macarthur was determined—it seemed to tickle him to be surrounded by Elizabeths—and what could it matter what she was called, as long as she lived?

  She was eighteen months old, Edward a lad of four, when at last we removed to Parramatta. She was still not a strong child, would have looked puny beside Daringa’s robust princess, but I hoped the move to Parramatta would give her new strength, and I had begun to trust that she was with me to stay.

  NOT A SINGLE PANG

  Sydney had been my home for three years, but I left it with not a single pang. After the departure first of the marines and then of the governor, it had changed beyond recognition. Thanks to the officers’ speculations, the place now ran unashamedly on rum, and rum fuelled every manner of corruption. The officers strutted about, lords of all they surveyed, and under them men scrabbled for crooked advantage.

  Even before Mr Dawes left, his headland had become a military battery, with cannons pointed towards the sea, and his hut and observatory had been absorbed into the military structures. The delicate track I had taken such delight in springing down was now a broad path trundled over by carts and gun carriages, and the next cove, where Mr Dawes’ friends had once had their camps, was a muddle of wharves and cockle-pickers’ huts.

  All around the settlement, grants were being made by the DD, fifty acres here, a hundred acres there. Every settler with a deed in his pocket felt entitled to chase away the tribes from the land that he thought now belonged to him by virtue of that piece of paper.

  But they obstinately remained. It was as if they were bound to the place by something stronger than comfort or preference. They went on perching, unwelcome and unhappy, on what we had claimed, as if determined to believe we would soon depart. They did not thrive, though, in the slivers of space we allowed them. Ailments that were no more than a week of discomfort for us proved fatal to them. The general sense among the settlers was that it was only a matter of time before, in a natural way like the turning of the seasons, our sable brethren would obligingly disappear.

  Among the natives who frequented the town I looked for the people I had come to know with Mr Dawes. Now and then I saw Daringa and the other women, and once Patyegarang too, sitting by a small fire at the water’s edge. I stopped, said the greeting I had learnt: bujari gamarruwa, and they greeted me in return. But they did not make room among themselves as an invitation to join them, as they had done when I knew them at the observatory. If they had, I might not have done so. Mrs John Macarthur, down in the dirt in front of the whole town with some native women? I will not pretend: that would have taken a woman braver than I.

  It was sadly clear to me that my acquaintance with the Sydney people had depended on Mr Dawes as intermediary. With him gone I could see no way to continue it. That time, that place—those few months, that headland—had been a neutral space, a momentary suspension of all the usual ways of being. People who stood on either side of a great chasm had come together to make a flimsy bridge. But it had been only a moment, and now it was gone.

  It was a relief to make the move to Parramatta, away from the reminders of those more innocent days. I turned my back, closed my eyes, looked only to my own advantage. Let me say it plain: I was no better than any of the others.

  THE FIRST MORNING

  The house at Parramatta stood on a sweet slope looking out to the north, the river at its feet. The township was a few minutes’ walk away, the governor’s house less than a mile. Mr Macarthur took great satisfaction in pointing out to me that our house was two feet longer than Government House.

  The first morning there, I walked from room to room, not a tremendous journey by any means, but from each of the main rooms I could see down to the brook, sparkling over stones as it ran to join the main river glinting between the mangroves. Sun came in at each window like a friend, and there was something about the spot—on the brow of a gentle rise, with a further rise at its back—that filled me with peacefulness. It was, of course, the echo of Grandfather’s house on its green Devon hillside, with sun pouring in and a great receptive quietness all around.

  Edward ran in and out, getting under the feet of the men bringing in boxes and chairs and tables. Little Elizabeth, that sweet dreamy child, stood in a shaft of sun in the parlour, her fine pale hair a crown of light around her head, lost in a trance as she stared out into the newly planted garden. She is too young to remember this, I thought: the sun, the hollow sound of the men bringing the boxes in and putting them in the empty rooms, the singing voices of the place we were in, of breeze in leaves, and birds, and all the unseen things that lived in the grass and spoke to each other. She would not remember how the sun felt on her face, and the feeling of a new beginning. But I would.

  Hannaford was put in charge of the labourers and proved more tha
n a match for those truculent men. Knew when to be open-handed with Mr Macarthur’s liquor, when to withhold. Mr Macarthur stood in front of the new men, laying down the law about what would be done to them if they took it into their heads to thieve, or utter profanities, or idle their way through their work, or offer insolence. Hannaford stood beside him, his expression obscured by his hat. After Mr Macarthur strode off, I heard Hannaford translating.

  – No back-talk from any of you buggers. And by God no effing and blinding or he will have your guts for garters.

  We left Smasher Sullivan behind in Sydney. He had served his time, got his ticket. I was glad to see the back of him. There was something about him I shrank from.

  Mrs Brown had the house servants under her. She had poor enough material to work with—girls who had been subjected to God alone knew what abuses before they had washed up here—but learned the ways of each, the way Grandfather knew the ways of each of his treasured milking-cows. One girl might respond to gentleness, another had to be chivvied. One could work from dawn to dusk if she did not have to think about what she was doing, while another rose to a challenge.

  – They are not bad girls, Mrs Macarthur, was all she would say when I praised the way she managed them. They are not bad girls.

  REPRIEVE

  As I had hoped, Parramatta was a reprieve from Sydney, where too many people were packed unhappily into too narrow a place. The sky was bigger here, bigger and cleaner and more open, the river lovely with drooping she-oaks, glistening mangroves, wild fowl dipping and gliding. The township was nothing more than a track with convict huts lined up along each side, and the modest patches of cultivation were sad scratched-over bits of dirt. But no matter how shabby the settlement was, and no matter how feeble the farming, the place had a comforting orderliness that compared well with the mud and squalor, the broken-down trees and bushes, the flayed look of Sydney.