Bettany's Book (74 page)

On a mad impulse I said, ‘It’s draughty out there. We should put her in the other room …’

I felt her breath on my neck. ‘It is …,’ she said, ‘… it is your wife’s room.’

I had wanted that very response, to be argued out of the proposal. And yet I myself argued for it all the more. ‘If there were justice on earth, it would be Phoebe’s room. Since there is none, Aldread might as well have it.’

The enormity of what I proposed hung in the dark above us.

‘You must think seriously on this, Mr Bettany,’ Bernard counselled me.

A new bed was found and Aldread moved, hacking and laughing, into the room where Phoebe and George perished. There was in me a distinct impulse to have her there, this colourful, generous yet vulgar being. By her hilarity she might change the aspect of this room and this house.

And yet sometimes when Bernard went to sit with her there, during crises of her breathing – when she nonetheless chatted busily on, the genial opposite of what one would think a spouse-murderer – I would leave the house, driven by some sense, akin to jealousy, of my not having been preferred. One thing I did definitely envy, and perhaps so did Bernard, was Aldread’s lack of grief. She had killed a husband and it lay lightly on her. I wished sometimes for that same lightness, I who was
tormented by the belief that I had whistled up my wife’s death, and in doing so caught by accident my son in the malice of that intent.

Some nights, driven by the implications of Aldread’s and dear Bernard’s sisterly amusement, I might simply walk away, eight miles to a shepherd’s hut, and surprise the shepherds at the fire.

‘Oh sir,’ the shepherds would say, from their little fireplace as the wind sluiced musically through every gap in the timbers of the place, ‘What are you doing abroad on such a night without a horse?’ And after we were settled and they shyly brought out moonshine, I might say, ‘What was it you did again? What landed you here?’ My awareness that we all had crimes ran very high on those nights.

If they were embarrassed to tell me the first time, I would again ask, ‘What brought you here?’ They were sometimes edgy at this moment, and I did not blame them. They thought I wanted news of their miserable and desperate acts, committed in England or Wales or Ireland as prelude to their Australian baptism, so that although living like them in slab timber, I could feel that I lay a distance above them in the human scale. They thought I wanted the assurance that, though they were criminals, I was an honest freeman. They did not understand that I wanted the company of their warm, anonymous ranks, their undistinguished crimes. Conscious of my leprosy, I wanted to lose myself amongst the lepers. I wished them to tell me about the lead they had stolen from the roofs of halls and churches, the locks they had forced, the livestock they had led away into darkness, so that I could measure, for the sake of my mind, the scale of my own guilt. I would walk back cold and consoled, and see by lamplight Bernard darkly, sombrely, studiously asleep.

Sometimes when I visited the hut there would be a native woman there, dressed in rags of burlap and skins and fabric clogged by mutton fat, some tribal outcast who had stayed on after the Moth people left in autumn. Where else was she to be? I had given up trying to win that moral argument, since I could not even win one with myself.

The Ngarigo woman might look at me with eyes even more unreadable than Bernard’s and hug to herself her skirt of flour bag. Her husband was perhaps amongst the bones the Reverend Howie and Long and I had found. Or had he been informally shot, in spite of my best instructions and warnings, and the reminder that Mr Howie would return, by one of my shepherds for spearing a sheep? This was something one could not always prevent either! The war, oh the war. Its skirmishes went
unrecorded and its thunders were borne away on south-westerly winds.

Such was my life at its highest and lowest moments.

Maggie Tume, the men’s cook, was a merry little woman and thought her taciturn O’Dallow such a wonderful fellow that she wanted to hold a woolshed celebration of their recent marriage, but was inhibited by the thought that I might be hurt to see happiness. Nevertheless, she asked Bernard to see if I would allow it, and Bernard, my chatelaine, did so, half-smiling at the enthusiasm of Maggie. Tume meant – if permitted – to reproduce a Celtic
ceilidh
, a rustic dance-party, deep in the Maneroo.

This request to licence merriment cheered me greatly. No sooner did I give assent than Tume had Presscart and O’Dallow cutting eucalyptus boughs to decorate the rafters and uprights of the woolshed. Clancy was heard practising the fiddle he had learned to play at sea in his youth and claimed to have played in bars in New York and Liverpool. Dear and dreaded Long rode a cart to Cooma Creek to buy kegs and bottles of porter.

On the night, Tume dressed with all the solemnity of a bride – she had found a good straw hat to substitute for a veil. Watching the celebration taking form from a chair by my window, I saw as O’Dallow and Tume went to the woolshed in late dusk that Tume had made O’Dallow wear a brown suit and a cravat. Her son, Michael, was also in a jacket, and wore shoes. Clearly, Tume was a coloniser, an improver!

To the woolshed in the next hour came seven stockmen; eight shepherds from nearby out-stations, their sheep safely in fold by this hour, and some of them with stoneware jugs of moonshine; a Ngarigo woman in a dress; Felix; beloved Bernard; and the consumptive Aldread. I had promised I might call in later, and after a fortifying glass of rum, I did so.

It was the first time I had entered the woolshed since my attempt at self-obliteration weeks before. I found it startlingly lit by all the station’s lights, gathered together from the huts by Tume. Flagons of liquor and bottles of stout were placed at one end of a long table, and slabs of damper and warm, sliced mutton at the other. Here, many of the population of Nugan Ganway were presently feeding themselves for the energetic night ahead.

In the middle of the far wall Bernard stood chatting to Long as he took a hand at tuning Clancy’s fiddle. From the sight of them a stranger would not have known that, in some lights, she might have been seen to
have betrayed him. In Long’s world the loss of a woman to the big house and the big name might not have been uncommon, and though my house and name were nothing to speak of, he had learned the limits of protest. He combined this profound knowledge with a furious pride, and his silence, his unaltered demeanour, was part of that pride too.

In full sight, dressed with boughs, was the rafter from which I had tried to break my neck, from which Bernard had scythed me down – her harvest. By considering it now, I concluded that every scene, every object – all which had once had a singleness of purpose – had become double, a sign of its own contradiction.

Clancy had by now assumed his duty as fiddler, producing a more than passable jig. The Ngarigo woman responded to it very lithely but when, at Felix’s invitation, Aldread bravely tried, she was overtaken with convulsions. Michael Tume, dancing a Gaelic reel by himself, breath thundering in and out of his throat, frowned over the steps in a country where the children of fallen souls were blessed. I sat by the door, and a shepherd fraternally brought me some raw liquor. ‘It’s the cream of the mountains, sir,’ he told me, recommending it.

Soon, Bernard had to help the poor gasping Aldread out of the shed and back to the homestead. Bernard’s dark eyes communicated with me. ‘I am going now, and so might you.’

So, between dances, I gave my final congratulations to the blessed couple and followed.

But even though Bernard was at home, I felt an undischarged embarrassment at the event. People had treated me as an elder and an invalid. I knew I was lucky to get out of the woolshed under that kind description. Yet how could I remain in that indefinite state and at the same time hold Nugan Ganway? Approaching the door to my homestead, I could hear Aldread laughing within, and, turning away in a kind of servant shyness, I wandered back in the direction of the woolshed, and far beyond it. Standing alone in the night I remembered the time I had lain naked under this exact sky and in innocence let its light wash my body. I dallied between woolshed and homestead, leaning to smoke a pipe by the stockyard, taking more note of stars than I needed to. In this state of uncertainty, belonging neither in the woolshed or the homestead, I understood how Phoebe had set out and succeeded in tethering me to the reality of things, of pastoral expanse and parlour intimacy. Now, it seemed that servants owned my woolshed, and servants – even the divine Bernard, and certainly the raucous Aldread – owned my hearth.

Thus, confused and shy, I swung away from the bright core of Nugan Ganway and strolled amongst the boulders a little way down the slope towards the river, then half a mile uphill towards the wooded ridge to the west. I took comfort from my ragged, punished breath the higher I got. At last I could look down in stillness at the bright lights shining through the gaps in the woolshed walls, and the smaller light of the homestead where Bernard and Aldread honoured their long-established sisterhood. The night was still and, in lieu of wind, there were the small, tinny judderings of Clancy’s violin, and a drumming accompaniment as if one of the men had found an empty cracker or tar tin and was beating it. The central vale of Nugan Ganway lay before me as incomprehensible as the court of a Khan might have been to Marco Polo. This was how the Ngarigo had seen my occupation, from this height, an ulcer of light and fire at the centre of their world. Homeless as them now, I descended the hill merely because there was nothing else left for me to do.

It took me a great time to descend that slope. Clancy’s violin ground itself through every extreme of feeling: of wistful despair and exuberant joy and heedless whimsy. I heard voices join in to bolster the fiddle music, sometimes with massed success, sometimes a mere raggedy chorus, sometimes the penetrating solitary voice of one man. I still paused often to confer with the neutral and upright trees. So much time passed that the closer I got down towards the homestead, and thus the woolshed, the greater I sensed a note of discord in the voices. The human race, as represented by my people on Nugan Ganway, was turning itself from two favourite activities – music and the consumption of liquor – to a third, conflict. The sort of shouting which goes with shaken fists drew me in close to the timbers of the woolshed.

I put my eye to a gap in the planking, through which I could feel the heat of the crowd within, the pulse of their intense hope and anger. The first figure I saw was Felix’s. He looked stunned, big lips parted in the pained grimace which on his baby face I had mistaken for a smile. I then spied briskly on the faces of my servants, for once seeing them as they were when I was not there to represent the force of the larger world and the pastoral demands of the place. And so I lighted upon O’Dallow and Long at the party’s centre. O’Dallow, who rarely spoke above a growl, flushed as one would expect the host of the celebration to be, was yelling at Long in Irish. But, legs spread wide and face glowing, he was soon forced to the English language by a desire to win allies to his denunciation of Long.

‘So I’m the only honest bastard of a man here. You, you mongrel dog, what can you claim of honesty?’

O’Dallow’s new wife held his forearm, trying to restrain him physically, trying to temper his voice as well. ‘You blew the head off that poor bloody absconder,’ cried O’Dallow. ‘He didn’t kill the nun. T’was bloody Goldspink who paid them to take the woman’s cart away, and then put you and old Bettany on their traps. Says poor bloody Rowan, I did not kill the nun! With his dying breath he said it! With his own blood on his lips. As I go to God, says Rowan, I did not touch the nun. And you heard him say it and put a bullet in his brain.’

Long stood up on the far side of the pool of light, and I saw his hand extend like a lance. ‘Were you there? Tell me, were you there?’

‘No. But you confided in me.’

‘Exactly. I confided … It was the very stroke of mercy I gave the poor fellow. I couldn’t take back the lead the magistrate had put in him, and he would not have been believed in any case.’

‘Oh Jesus, that’s a splendid mercy you’ve got there. You’d give it to me too, if I lay down to let you! But I won’t lie down for you, you bloody dog! Such a man are you, such a bloody slave! You let old Bettany take your woman. I would die, I would go to Norfolk Island, I would be flogged raw before I let a man take mine! “God bless you, Mr Bettany,” say you. “And you’re welcome to her. And would Your Worship want me to hold her still while you take her?”’

I hurt my fist against the wall, though no one heard. There was too much hubbub inside, and to the credit of my servants, some aghast looks. I hoped Long would hit him now. In moonshine one had not only the truth, but it was viciously told as well.

Long said in a quiet voice, ‘Don’t say a word of Bernard. You are an ape beside her! She is no man’s woman, and never will be.’

‘Right you are,’ yelled O’Dallow. ‘For isn’t she another woman’s woman now?’

Tume, weeping, tried to gag her husband. ‘She’s the woman of that coughing Venus from the Factory who poisons husbands and spits blood,’ said Dallow. ‘So maybe you’ll have your way in the end, Sean, you poor sawney bastard! Maybe she’ll put sheep drench in old Bettany’s tea!’

Why did Long not deliver the blow? Surely he did not believe there was any value in O’Dallow’s drunken version of our lives? It was, in the end, merciful Clancy who laid down his fiddle, knowing it would not
soon be needed, that the music was for now at its close, and picked up from the side of a stove used to boil tar in shearing-time a lump of wood. Crossing to the civil war, he brought it down behind O’Dallow’s ear. The bridegroom’s eyes rolled, his legs gave way slowly, but he did not fully collapse, for his dutiful wife held him up while calling Clancy a bloody pig and a foul bugger. Long cried, the most authoritative utterance he had made in the whole dispute, ‘The wedding party is over now. God bless all souls here. All you have heard is talking drink.’