A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  A DOVETAIL JOINT

  One evening, a year after the night of four thousand pounds, Mr Macarthur unveiled another grand scheme.

  – My dearest, he said as we sat down by the fire after dinner, it has been evident to me for some time that we have had the best of what speculation can offer. I have deliberated on our future here, and see that the way forward is in the production of fine wool.

  – Of fine wool! I said, and only someone who knew me better than Mr Macarthur would have heard my astonished amusement.

  – A thinking man has always been able to see that this colony needs a product fit for export, he said. Wool fits the bill. We have proved how well sheep can do in this country.

  I held up my fan as if to shield my cheeks from the fire.

  – My Spanish purchases have shown what is possible, he said. The scheme of putting the Spanish to inferior crosses has exceeded all my hopes.

  From behind the fan I watched him. He betrayed not the slightest awareness that the scheme, as he called it, was nothing he had ever intended. He was not pretending, not lying. I saw that his greatest strength was to enter so fully into his constructions that he authentically forgot they were not true.

  He strode about the room talking with such passion that white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Not only had he put the sheep together in such a way as to produce the finest wool the world had ever seen. He would go further, and take into his own hands every aspect of bringing it to market.

  You could not simply put casks of John Macarthur wool on a ship and send them to London and expect the wool merchants to flock down to the wharf demanding it! A knowledgeable fellow would have to be there, someone with a nose for a deal who could be trusted to see the business through. There was only one man who was fit for the task: himself. As soon as he could, he would find a pretext to get leave of absence from the Corps and take a passage to London with a shipment of wool. He apologised that I would be obliged to stay in New South Wales. Laid the flattery on thick.

  – I am perfectly aware, my dear wife, of the difficulties you will encounter in looking after our interests here, he said. I am fully convinced that not one in a thousand would have the resolution and perseverance to contend with them. But I have confidence in you, my dearest wife, to surmount them in a way that will make me grateful and delighted.

  I had to pretend to doubt my ability. It would not do to look eager. But it was not difficult to strike the right note, because he was hardly listening. His horizon was filled with the picture of himself striding the stage of London, a new-world Jason dazzling all before him with his golden fleece. The more difficult feat was not allowing him to glimpse my relief.

  Six months to sail to England. Six months back again. A year in between to get his nose into those deals. Two years, then. And if Hannaford and I could continue to send one shipment after the other, Mr Macarthur might feel obliged to stay in London to sell those too. The challenge—my mind, like his, was flying over the future—would be to make sure that the flow of wool was good, but never so good that it would furnish enough capital for us to return to England. I let myself imagine it: two years, four years. Eight years.

  But told myself not to hope. He was not gone yet.

  There was a beautiful logic to it all. Mr Macarthur wanted to trade wool. I was content to be left behind to produce it. It gave me wry satisfaction to understand that in this business, if in no other, Mr Macarthur and I fitted together as sweetly as a dovetail joint.

  TWO CHANCES OUT OF FIVE

  Before Mr Macarthur had organised a passage, some kind of rebellion began to rumble among the officers. It was about the governor. My husband did not tell me the ins and outs of it, and I did not want to hear them. But there had been a trial, run, as all trials were, by the officers of the Corps, and the governor had been foolish enough to disagree with the judgment of that court.

  Something about Mr Macarthur had the effect of sending people into a frenzy in which they acted contrary to their own interests. His greatest art may have been that of provocation: to incite others to folly by cold precision, icy scorn, lofty contempt. Sir, I could have told the governor, on no account stir the hornet’s nest of my husband. You may think you will win, and for a time you might, but in the end you will be destroyed.

  With Mr Macarthur’s encouragement the business spiralled into rage. The officers made a pact to refuse any communication with the governor, going so far as to ignore him in the street. All but Colonel Paterson. Peaceable by nature, he had other motives as well. He was an old friend of the governor, and both men were protégés of the all-powerful Sir Joseph back in England. The colonel could make an enemy of the governor and Sir Joseph, or he could make an enemy of Mr Macarthur. He was exactly where Mr Macarthur liked to see his enemies: between the jaws of a trap.

  When the affair came to a crisis, I knew only that there was a hurricane in the house, of Mr Macarthur rushing in from Sydney and clattering around in his library, fetching down the case containing his duelling pistols. I stood in the doorway as he checked them, his hands trembling, not with fear but excitement. The spring inside him was wound tight.

  – Paterson has challenged me, the fool. The Lord have mercy on him, for none will he obtain from me!

  – Mr Macarthur, I said, and put out a hand, but no words would have made him listen. He was smiling, his eyes crinkled up in pleasure, as if looking forward to a treat.

  – He is my game, he said. I charge you, my dear wife, not to attempt to interrupt me in the chase!

  – Mr Macarthur, I said again, unable to work out whether I should try to stop him or encourage him. Consequences radiated out from each choice, but I could not compute them.

  – Never mind any of that, he said, though I had found nothing to say. I am now so deeply in that the game begins to be amusing.

  – Amusing, I repeated. The game.

  Outwit, outwait. That motto had served me well, but I had run out of wit, run out of time to wait.

  After he left, the house was very quiet, as if it were holding its breath. I stood looking out the front door at the garden, the sound of his horse spurred to a gallop fading slowly into the distance.

  The duel would happen behind the Parramatta barracks, in a private space among trees where I knew several bloodless duels had already been fought. I imagined everyone assembling there: the principals, the seconds, the surgeon. The pistols would be loaded—by Mr Macarthur, of course. Then there would be the ceremonial pacing-out of the distance. Then the shots. If I stepped outside the front door, I might hear them. One, two.

  And then? Some cool part of me laid out the possibilities. Both men might miss their mark. Mr Macarthur might wound the colonel. The colonel might wound Mr Macarthur. The colonel might kill Mr Macarthur. Mr Macarthur might kill the colonel.

  The arithmetic told me that there was one chance in five that in an hour my husband would be brought back a corpse. One chance in five that he would be arrested as a murderer. Two chances out of five, then.

  I did not quite put the thought into words: Two chances out of five that I will be free of him. But let me be frank, I did that calculation with hope, not dismay. There is no point pretending in these private pages.

  It was very late when Mr Macarthur came home, but he was neither dead nor a murderer. The colonel’s ball had missed its mark entirely, but Mr Macarthur’s trick pistol had sent his ball through the colonel’s shoulder.

  Even in tumultuous New South Wales, sending a ball through one’s commanding officer could not be overlooked. The governor was obliged to act. Until it was established whether Colonel Paterson would live or die, the governor put Mr Macarthur under restriction: he was not to leave our house. Whereupon of course the prisoner wrote to the governor to ask whether he was permitted to walk from room to room within his house? What about the verandah? And the outhouse?

  Once it was clear that the colonel would survive, Mr Macarthur began to agitate for a court martial to clear his name.
The governor wanted none of that, and showed himself willing to release him, on surety that he would keep the peace. That was a poor move: it was easy for Mr Macarthur to refuse the governor’s offer. He had only to stand on his honour, that corrupted bit of tinsel.

  It was then that I understood. If he refused the governor’s offer, the governor would be obliged to send him for trial to England.

  Mr Macarthur left Parramatta on the packet boat to Sydney on a fine November afternoon. The following day, he would board His Majesty’s ship the Hunter and sail out of Sydney Cove, past the bays and headlands of the harbour, between the cliffs that the Scarborough had brought us through twelve years before, and onto the ocean that would take him to England.

  I watched the little boat head off with the tide down the river, take the wide bend where the mangroves spread out into the stream, and disappear. First it was there, then it disappeared as if smoothly swallowed by the mangroves: bow, body, stern, the last flap of the flag hanging behind. I stood watching as if it might appear again, grow larger, return to the dock, as if the whole idea of Mr Macarthur leaving was a delicious fantasy.

  I watched for some unmeasured stretch of time, of the new time that belonged to me. Then there were only the dancing points of light on the river, the busy lap of water against the stones of the jetty, a gull sweeping past with one hard sharp cry, and myself, a woman breathing the sweet air of solitude.

  FORTY YEARS HAVE passed between then and now, as I sit in the sunny little room in the house at Parramatta where for so long I attended to business. Mr Macarthur called this place Elizabeth Farm, but at the top of my letters it is simply Parramatta, and I never write the word without thinking of the people whose language it is, for whom Parramatta has always been, and always will be, the Place of Eels.

  Now, after so many years here, I know better than ever what has been done to the Gadigal, the Wangal, the Cameraygal, the Burramattagal and all the others. Not just the turning-off from their lands and the damage to their old ways. Not just the cruelties inflicted. Not just the deaths. Behind all that is another, fundamental violence: the replacement of the true history by a false one.

  Closest to home—literally, as I sit here looking down towards the river where the event is supposed to have taken place—is what happened an hour after dawn on that summer morning when Pemulwuy threw a spear at a soldier.

  He escaped from the hospital, the fetter still around his leg. He led another few years of depredations till at last a reward was offered for him to be caught, dead or alive. A settler shot him, and to prove the fact cut off his head, which was sent to England for the scientific gentlemen.

  The death of one man did not mean the end of attacks: they continue to this day in the distant parts. How could it be otherwise? Depredations and outrages are our words. Another way to describe what is going on is to call it defending a homeland.

  But after that morning the settlers felt a new confidence. They called the affray The Battle of Parramatta, as if those few minutes of hubbub could take their place beside the battles of Thermopylae or Agincourt, a victory that signalled God’s approval.

  The Battle of Parramatta confirms the story the settlers tell themselves about the people they displaced: that they are irrational and lack good sense. Heavens, they thought they could take on one of His Majesty’s fortified garrisons! The story, and all the others like it, convinces the settlers that, in dispossessing the first inhabitants, they are simply part of the natural order, in which the strong and clever replace the weak and foolish. It might be sad, but they assure each other that it is as inevitable as night following day.

  Mr Macarthur wrote an account of the affray, which must have been sent to the governor, who must have relayed it to Captain Collins, who was at that time in England. Collins used it in his account of the colony, and as far as I know it has never been questioned.

  Perhaps it was my lessons in astronomy that make me doubt what seems beyond doubt. That, and my knowledge that Pemulwuy’s people are neither weak nor foolish. The story relayed by Captain Collins is really only credible if you believe they are.

  I cannot tell you just what happened on that far-off morning. I only know that it could not have been as Mr Macarthur told it to me, and as Captain Collins has told the world. Knowing my husband as I do, I have no doubt that it was some tale of trickery: a trap or an ambush or a promise betrayed. Whatever it is, the truth has been silenced, and this other story put in its place.

  I am a newcomer here, ignorant of the inner grain of the place. The lifetime of one woman cannot be put beside the uncountable generations of the people who were here before me. Still, newcomer though I am, this is home to me now. Any other place would be exile.

  I understand, though, that mon petit coin, that room made of leaves down by the river, is not really à moi. Like most of the other newcomers, in the past I never gave a proper name to what I was doing. Now I am prepared to be more honest. As Mrs Brown did, I have to face the fact that I am a thief. More a thief than Mrs Brown, who was a thief only once. I have been a thief for every one of those forty years.

  Yes, I make sure the people who live within our boundaries are treated well. I supply them with various items that they seem to value, although they lived without them until recently and, after all, it is because of our coming that they need them now. We greet each other by name, and we converse a little—in English, since their English is so much better than my Burramattagal—about this and that, like any other neighbours.

  But underneath that goodwill, we all know an undigestible fact: I am not prepared to give them back what has always been theirs. Not prepared to gather up my children and get on a ship and return to the place of our forebears.

  I can see no way to put right all the wrongs done, no more than I could all those years ago when I picked up the stick belonging to a Burramattagal woman and heard what it was saying. The difference is that now I do not turn away. I am prepared to look in the eye what we have done.

  That repairs no part of the sorrow of it, I know. But it is the first thing, the first hard truth, without which no repair can ever be hoped for.

  Outside the window the last glow of the day lies softly on the garden, and beyond are the big calm trees that have been growing for so many years, long before Elizabeth Veale took up space in the world. What comfort there is in knowing that trees, sunlight, birds go on, indifferent to the life in this house, or in the heart of the woman at its heart.

  What I see now is that destiny, Providence—whatever name you might give to bald luck—gave me two glorious stretches of time without Mr Macarthur. His first absence was four years, the second closer to a decade. When he returned the second time, the alternating bouts of mania and black gloom had taken over his life. He was like a machine that runs too fast and smokes and creaks till it tears itself to pieces. What a glorious irony that his madness in the end took the form of a conviction that his wife was being unfaithful to him. Many years after his wife had revelled in the embraces of Mr Dawes, Mr Macarthur spoke the truth, but by then he had been too mad for too long, had made too many accusations, and no one listened.

  The years of his absence presented me with chances offered to few women. Managing the flocks without him, I was not wife, not widow, not old maid. None of those, yet all of them at once. In the ambiguity of my situation I could be nothing more or less than myself, and to be what we all are, especially at the end: alone.

  What an unsung pleasure it is to be alone, when we are supposed to fear it. Dull it might seem, but as a woman who has survived an interesting marriage, I am happy to be dull.

  Now, in what I suppose a poet might call the evening of my life, it is the evenings I love best. At the end of the day it is like a prayer to walk down to the river when the shadows are lying long over the grass. Every evening there is lovely, but today a storm had recently passed, and in the orange glow of sunset a tremendous sky laid itself out like a vast noble text. There was every kind of cloud: crisp white fleck
s stippled in loose lines, white wisps like an old man’s hair, dramatic piles laid thick as carpet, pink puffs catching an edge of sunset, and, as if wandered in from another sky altogether, two small bright clouds exactly the shape of Mr Dawes’ lenses.

  I sat on the log watching the light fade, the river holding the soft glow of the sky. There were five Burramattagal children picking their way along a slip of sand, each child’s long thin legs straightening and jointing, straightening and jointing, legs made for walking great distances, never tiring, and every jointing, every straightening, reflected with absolute fidelity in the water at their feet so it seemed there were ten children, five upside down and five the right way up. Each seemed as real as the other, so you could wonder which was child, which reflection. Which the eternal past of this place, and which the eternal future, those feet part of the land through all time.

  I write this—why? What does it matter that those children made a thing of such beauty that I felt compelled to record it? What does it matter that there was a person the future will remember as Elizabeth Macarthur, who wanted to be known for who she was?

  I will give this private account no title. I see it as a river like the one I grew up beside, always curling on, dimpling and surging in its bed, never fixed and measurable but only ever a moment—There! That!—giving way to another moment—That! There!

  Mr Dawes would say: Write nothing. Leave nothing. What do you care if people in the future believe the insipid fiction of your letters? He would be right. In the unimaginable future when these papers are found, no one will remember Mrs Macarthur, and her glorious husband will be nothing more than a dim name in a dull book about the past.

  Mr Dawes would be right, but he would be wrong, too. I am no poet, but like them I am greedy to be remembered, even by some stranger of the future, as one true person, speaking straight into the face of time. Others want to find God. I have always had a more modest aim. I am happy enough to find myself coming to meet myself in what I have written here, and stand up in greeting.