Bettany's Book (31 page)

I quelled the intoxication I felt. This previously unknown sprite had emerged from the landscape to be the first to praise the Nugan Ganway fleece.

‘I must,’ I told him, ‘in consideration of my partners, consult other dealers and their clerks.’ He managed a frank grimace of disappointment.

Dusting his hands, he took a pair of fawn gloves from his pocket and put them on.

‘In that case, sir, I must bid you good morning. But if you should see me at Liverpool and Parramatta crossroads, where agents less energetic and more brazen than young and fortunate Barley are at this hour barely rousing from their beds and complaining at being in bush, then I shall greet you as a friend whatever happens, and we may feel need to discuss things further.’ He nodded, briskly remounted, and rode away, a natural in the saddle. I was sad to see him go. I wanted to come to terms with him if possible.

Clancy and I rolled through the Black Huts, and in a few miles neared the famous inn called the Wool Pack, at the place where the road from Parramatta joined the Liverpool road on the edge of that small village. In a great space before the inn we saw an armada of bullock trucks groaning with wool, and scattered amongst them the sleek town phaetons of Sydney wool merchants. The verandah of the Wool Pack seethed with men in more or less the same town uniform Barley had worn, and men too like Clancy and myself, dust in their coats and broad brimmed hats, trousers which had known river, mud, and the blood of sheep.

The clerk at the Wool Pack told me that all the rooms were three times full, so I rode across the junction towards Liverpool to the Dangling Man
where I found a room in which to put my shirt and bed roll. On the crowded verandah of the place many other pastoral gentlemen were sitting, smoking pipes and drinking ale. I saw one settler who had not bothered to shave rush up to another and cry, ‘Eight pence a pound, Mr Tucker. How does that make you feel?’ And the two of them were laughing, a year in the bush redeemed at 8 pence per pound.

It seemed these gentlemen had not met Mr Barley.

My accommodation settled, and with the firm intention of later rewarding Clancy with a bottle of rum, a prospect I did not distract him with at this stage, I went back to the wagon and waited for visits from some of the gentleman wool merchants. Few of them were as pleasant or enthusiastic as Barley. They gave instead a sour appearance of weariness. Most of them had clerks whom they made climb up and bring down handfuls of wool – no clambering for them. Nor did they have the courtesy of needle and thread, so that Clancy and I were required to reseal the packs by our own devices. Some of them offered as little as 9 pence, others 10. One of them offended me by offering 7 pence ha’penny.

‘Where is your station?’ he asked. He had already been drinking, and there was a map of pink veins on his cheeks.

‘South of the County of Argyle, on the plateau, up against the southern ranges.’

‘Well, sir, why don’t you call a spade a spade? That’s the Maneroo country, as I fully expected from the quality of the wool. That is not prime wool country, sir. That is passable wool country.’

And so they came, inspecting the handfuls of wool as if they were the entrails of chickens, looking for omens of coming great houses, of better phaetons, of rarer bay mounts, of imported crystal, of exporting their sons to Oxford and their daughters to finishing schools. By 11 o’clock I had been offered 11 pence ha’penny by a sour old man in a frock coat. At his offer, I remembered hearing, at the age of twelve, an old Tasmanian ticket-of-leave man, a West Country fellow, in conversation with my father, saying, ‘There be great wealth in ha’pennies.’

At noon I went back to the Dangling Man for some ale and bread, and I saw the same two men I had noticed earlier, one rushing up to the other and exclaiming, ‘Nine pence a pound, Clarence. What do you think of that?’ By the door, as this sentence was uttered, I was grateful to see Barley sitting in a big cane chair, looking hot yet composed.

He smiled at me, and looked the most humane man in all this wild scene. ‘Actors employed by certain wool brokers, Mr Bettany,’ he called
to me. ‘In the hope of talking the sellers down. This is the great Australian drama. Ah, but did great fortune, as distinct from a pound here and there, ever derive from low stratagems?’

‘Perhaps more than we would like to think,’ I told him.

‘I do not presume you have come to see me on business, Mr Bettany, but it is requisite that brokers buy the pints. Could I pay for a pint or dram of your pleasure?’

I accepted and we entered the interior of the hotel, moving across a sawdusted floor in a dark press of excited men. Barley greeted a number of settlers by name. This one from Yass, another from the Liverpool Plains, whose respect he obviously had earned in dealings earlier that morning or in previous years. He was exactly the sort of good fellow who would be a clever clerk in England, but the maker of a fortune in New South Wales. As I knew and hoped, colonies exist to exalt the humble. And here at least no one resented a northern English accent if it came with the right price. He returned his attention to me as the pints he had ordered were delivered to the counter by a florid, no doubt ticket-of-leave, barmaid. Barley held his glass upright.

‘Mr Bettany,’ he urged me. ‘I ask you to imagine Garroway’s famed coffee house in Change Alley, Cornhill, London. Renowned, my friend, renowned. Dim lit. Dimmer than this. For it’s late in English winter. London merchants sit around before their coffee ready to bid on Australian fleece. They have already bought what they want of Irish and Saxon wool, but they know that it is no longer height of quality, and they await this robust fleece from ends of earth. Auctioneer mounts his stand and promises them something of the best.’

‘Have you been there?’ I asked.

‘With my master from Salford, when I was young,’ he nodded. ‘I was raised in wool trade. And I can see a future – not perhaps coming European winter but succeeding one – when Nugan Ganway wool has repute it deserves. A reputation as a staple. And so on this day sixteen months hence, a bale with your markings is placed on table and opened. Auctioneer says, “It is Nugan Ganway wool, such as we first saw last year.” Dealers, hard men, believe me, Mr Bettany, hard men, wealthy men, canny, now lean forward in respect. A mark is made on candle on auctioneer’s bench. Bids must be made before candle burns down as low as that mark. Nugan Ganway, shipped by Robert Barley, Sydney, New South Wales. Hard and avaricious fellows lean forward, Bettany. That is a moment! And so year by year that wool goes to Garraway’s, and
candle is marked, and bids are uttered in a husky tremble, and are no sooner uttered than topped, sir, topped. When I bid for your wool, Mr Bettany, I bid for a lifetime of wool, year after year until we are old men. Old men blessed by fortune.’ And then he raised his pint and drank with me. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘I would be honoured to match your best bid.’

So there, at the close of his Yorkshire eloquence, I sold him my first wool shipment. We were so compatible as we talked that he asked me to join his family for a Sydney Christmas. He said that was the squatters’ time, when men came from remote stations and stayed with prosperous relatives and friends and waited through the warmth of January for the Squatters’ Ball. There they met their future wives. He could see no reason I should not leave Nugan Ganway with my overseer and spend two happy summer months with him, with Christmas dinner at his house at Darling Point – chicken, turkey, pork pies, puddings, sherry, wine and ales, and then a cooling of the person in the waters of Port Jackson, ‘weather-eyeing it’, to use Barley’s phrase, for sharks. He repeated the verdict of an American whaling captain on the beauty of Sydney women, namely that even the lowest in society, the ticket-of-leave man’s daughter, fed on colonial doughboys, was unparalleled. “Boston or New Bedford could not hold a candle, sir.”

As I drank, I tested this daydream against the reality of my life. I found that the rawness of the conditions at Nugan Ganway, my own rawness over Mr Finlay’s attitude, and the revival in my mind of Phoebe, who by her rash letter had somehow managed to create her own space there, all made me unwilling to waste time walking into a room full of Sydney women. And I also found, deep into my fourth pint, that I wanted no misunderstanding between Barley and myself.

‘You realise my father was a Van Diemen’s Land convict?’ I suddenly asked Barley. I did not do my usual trick of saying what a minor, almost admirable crime he had committed.

‘By God,’ said Barley, ‘At least one-fourth of all fine wool settlers, I would say, have been in chains in their day …’

‘Yes, but don’t say people fail to remark on it. You have just remarked yourself, Mr Barley. If, say, I were charming, which I very much doubt, wouldn’t they say, “Charming for a convict’s son”, and if I did not behave well, would they not say, “Well, what could you expect?”’

‘Oh my friend, I am not in a position to say such things. Who was my father? He was a servant came in Governor Darling’s party. Like a felon he had his hidden virtue and like a felon needed to crush his cleverness
down into a hidden place within. There be high Tories of Sydney who speak in way you mention, as if they ride high above the mass, which is unlikely – many are former officers of low station, and some have convict mothers too! I tell you so you see me correctly – I am a Whig. Though people in wool generally tend towards Tory-dom, a result of their long acquaintance with sheep! But I am a Whig of my own kind. Most want transport system ended. I want it kept going because it redeems convict shepherds and it serves all wool, sir, all fine Merino fleece.’ He broke into laughter. ‘If you be convict’s son, Bettany, you are a sign that clever lads can’t be kept down.’

The wool clip weighed, Clancy drove it into Sydney, to Barley’s warehouse. With the gentleman himself, I rode into Sydney too for a brief visit and met his wife at their white-limed sandstone house. She was a Northumbrian, thickly accented, but seemed as merry a soul as Barley himself. As for the projected Squatters’ Ball, the Tory wool merchants of Sydney would need to wait another year before I was established enough to allow them to run the risk of meeting me.

We went sailing on a skiff of Barley’s in the harbour, thumping along over waves kicked up by a sou-easter. As we pulled the skiff ashore, Barley straightened and said to me, ‘Would you accept some money of mine, on the normal thirds basis, into the operation at Nugan Ganway? It is simply that I know a competent man when I see him. There is, sir, an outrageous incompetence amongst some pastoral gents.’

Intoxicated as I was by the sun and that resonant thump of water in my head, I said I was delighted to consider it. After dinner I told him I would write to my friend, Charlie Batchelor, and if it was satisfactory to him, then we would welcome Mr Barley as a partner.

He seemed too to pick up on my thoughts. I reflected that I would have the joy of banking my wool money, and within a quarter of an hour, as if in answer to my thoughts, he said, ‘My advice, by which I mean advice from other reliable men, is to bank in part with Bank of Australia and in part with Savings Bank. Savings Bank, freed convict as it may be, has great underpinning resources from a Mr Samuel Terry, a tobacco thief in England, who made a fortune in this town as a merchant. Bank of Australia is certainly bank of supposed respectable men, but is, I hear, based on property prices and not as immune to vagaries of markets.’

I thought of Mr Finlay, who had occasionally carolled the Bank of Australia as the only worthwhile institution. Now, due to a word from Barley, I would divide my funds, putting half with one, half with the other. I concluded there was a considerable beneficial amount to be learned from Mr Barley, who could not afford definite articles but could afford generosity.

One of my duties returning through Goulburn was to call in on young Felix at Mr Loosely’s Universal Academy. I found that esteemed pedagogue in splendid spirits, and he sent out to the yard for Felix to be fetched into the parlour. For some reason, while I waited I felt uneasy. Had I done the right thing by this small pilgrim? But as he entered in breeches, shirt and boots without socks, I noticed that in the months since I had seen him, he had become a boy. Under a kindly regime, his facial constriction had nearly disappeared. He had not quite reached a hand-shaking age and so I was reduced to the patriarchal business of head-patting.

Mr Loosely turned to me and in a lowered voice murmured, ‘He has extraordinary facility, sir.’ He took down a book from the shelves –
A Child’s Life of Isaac Newton
. It had large and majestic print. He handed it to the boy. ‘Read, would you, Felix?’

Felix read in a melodious and well-paced voice. ‘The infant Isaac Newton did not utter a word until the age of two, and his grandparents wondered aloud if the child would grow up mute. But his mother always reassured them with the words, “Isaac is not slow to speak. It is simply that he has not chosen what to say. When he does speak, the world will not easily be returned to the way it previously existed.”’

I was of course gratified. I laid aside some pocket money for the boy and prepared to leave with that feeling of comfort a man has when his semi-accidental arrangements yield sublime results.

‘You must return, sir,’ said Mr Loosely at his gate. ‘This boy bears watching.’