Remembering Babylon (8 page)

She could not afford such surrenders. Her nature was less volatile than his, less prone to extremes. Occasionally, washing an old frock with a pattern of larkspurs, all their lively colour gone to grey, she would experience a little pang at the thought that she might never again see one. She had chosen the print, years ago, because she had loved so much their vivid blue. But she had few regrets for the world she had left – perhaps because she had none at all for her youth. She lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.

They came in the afternoon with their bits of darning. As the needles went in, they lowered their eyes and put their questions, all barbed concern.

Gemmy, it was always Gemmy. What had they talked of, she wondered, before Gemmy arrived to give that breathless urgency to their talk and to darken the air in the close little hut to a point where she wondered, sometimes, how even by screwing their eyes up they could find the hole to thread a needle, the room was so dense with the shadows they called up to terrify themselves and one another.

Didn’t she find it hard sometimes to sit at the same table with him? Considering that he might be happier running about naked – goodness, remember that first day! – than in the shirts she washed for him. Oh and the trousers, of course! And eating grubs – imagine! – than potatoes and cold mutton. That is, if it wasn’t something worse. Their own grandfathers, so they say. And wasn’t she scared, just a little – well they knew
she
wasn’t but they would be, it was a wonder really how calm she was – of the time he spent with the children. The little girls, for instance. And Lachlan, who was so lively and impressionable? Wasn’t she worried sometimes about the influence the fellow might be having? And did she
really let him chop wood for her? Actually let him loose with an
axe
?

The word assumed substance, took shape, and you heard the swish of its blade through the stilled air in the suspension of their breath. Gracie Corcoran, who was a Roman, crossed herself.

They were forgetting, she told them frostily. Gemmy was white.

She despised these attempts to undermine her. What especially enraged her was the suggestion that she might not have her children’s safety at heart. She would not let them see how they had unsettled her. Calm. Is that what they thought?

They were in a place where there were no sureties of any kind. Of course she wasn’t calm! And of course there were times when she was not just scared but petrified, though for the most part she was not, and these weaker moments she kept to herself.

You took slow, shallow mouthfuls of air till the fear drew off.

You took it for granted that life would stay normal, and if you believed that hard enough, it did. Three meals on the table, plates drying on the rack, a wash on the line, shirts, children’s things, empty for now but ready to be drawn over your head and stepped into, and hooked and buttoned and soiled and sweat-stained in the time to come.

But there were nights, lying stiffly in the dark, hands clenched at her side, heart thumping, when she did not feel sure.

She was aware of the three children breathing in the dark, two of them her own, the third a sacred trust; the notes of their breathing as different, as distinct one from the other, as their voices, or their bright, quick bodies. What would become of them? What sort of life could they have up here?

She had wanted to give Lachlan a better chance than he might have got at home, but he was wayward, he could go any way at all in this country that was all fits and changes, one thing one minute, another the next. There was no way of telling. Was Gemmy really an influence on him?

It was now, in this loose state at the edge of sleep, or, worse
still, of despairing sleeplessness, that her neighbours’ doubts took possession of her.

Her mind strayed to where he was sleeping, curled up under a red blanket in his lean-to against the side of the hut; just inches away, the other side of the wall.

Occasionally, in the deep hours, a cry would come from him. Jock would start awake, his hand already feeling for the shotgun; one of the children, stirring, might speak as if in answer, then a second.

She would lay her hand to her husband’s arm. He would settle, the child would settle. She would lie there, reaching for breath; wondering what dream out of the dark world he had lived in had come back to claim him or he had gone to meet; which in the open, unguarded state you fell into when consciousness lapsed might have the power to cross from one head to another, to her husband’s familiar one on the pillow beside her, where he slept on his back with his mouth open and his fists lightly clenched above his collarbone, or into the fair head of one or other of the children where a pallet shifted with a rustling of shucks.

The stretch of smothering darkness that followed was longer than any stretch of daylight, and space too lost all dimensions. Getting up in the pitch blackness, she would set her foot to the ground, and, with one hand held in front, set off unsteadily for where the water butt stood, ten paces off beside the door. It was like crossing a continent, step by step, with the darkness infinitely expanding ahead and no visible marker on either side. At last her knuckles knocked against wood, she found the dipper, her lips touched a familiar coolness that was like light in her skull.

After such nights, the way back to normality was through habit: matchflare, the worrying of flame out of chips, six mugs unhooked and set down on the table, children, with the puffiness of sleep still on them, not yet come in from the dreams they had been off in, coaxed back to their daylight selves. Little Meg smelling of milk and eager still to cling on, Janet chewing the end of her plait, Lachlan with something distant, almost combative in his look, as if the smoky hut with its familiar objects and smells was not what he had been
expecting or was willing for the moment to accept; Jock, as always, finding it hard to get started, elbows on the table, head, all blond tufts, in his swollen hands, the bared neck showing its wrinkles, coarse and pitiable. He would have to shuffle along the form to make room for the girls. He did it without speaking. The girls accepted it. They were used to his glooms. ‘Lachlan,’ she would say for the second time, but low, not to draw her husband’s attention.

The boy, slowly pulling on his pants, would make a face and pretend not to hear. If he held back long enough, he thought, Gemmy would offer to go and split the wood she needed. He would get off.

‘Naw Gemmy,’ she insisted. Gemmy with his doited look would be stumbling about in a light-headed way, eager at an instant for any task she might have for him, all headlong incompetence, and with no hint of the dark places to which the night might have taken him. ‘That’s Lachlan’s job. Lachlan! If I hae to speak to ye again –’

Jock would raise his head, and Gemmy, hearing the iron in her voice, and fearing the blows that might come – not to him – would hop about in an agony of distress. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Gemmy,’ she would tell him, ‘be still noo and drink yer tea.’

She was establishing the precarious order that in just a moment now would make the day lurch and move forward on its ordinary course. ‘Come on, lad,’ she urged, her tone a little easier, ‘stir yersel’ and fetch ma wuid.’

I
T WAS
George Abbot’s custom in the late afternoon to go out with a book, usually a French one, since he was keen, even here where he had no opportunity of practising it, to keep up his proficiency in the tongue. The slim volume in his pocket, its scrolled lettering upheld by putti, represented escape from his own nature and the humiliations and mean insufficiencies of his schoolmaster’s existence, but even more importantly, kept open in him, by employing the talents that would be adequate to it, the hope of a kinder future.

He had several favourite retreats. There, the book on his knee and his boots in the dust, he would sit – always alert for ants – in the peppery scent and dull blaze of a tropic afternoon; but his head would be in another place altogether (call it Paris) where the words his soul danced to,
sensibilityé, coeur, paradis
, relieved him of his bear-like heaviness and rough colonial boots, and all around, the scrub, as the word
paysage
lit it, assumed new but familiar colours, then opened in avenues, at the end of which, among drooping foliage, a columned temple glowed, where the crude needs he was assailed by fell away as he stepped into the company of a heroine, demanding but also subtly compliant, with the most delicate wrists, and a delectable, angelic little knowing upper lip, whose name was Ursule, or Victorine.

One day he was tramping along to a place where the entry into this world was easy, when he was hailed by a voice on the track behind him, and when he turned a woman was there, an old woman in brown, rather squat, bareheaded, and wearing boots that were a size too big for her. He recognised her immediately though they had never been introduced.

‘That’s lucky,’ she called. She carried a sack over her shoulder and was dragging behind her a good twelve feet of fallen branch. He stood with his book in his hand and waited for her to catch up.

‘Here,’ she said, as she came up beside him, ‘take this,’ and passed the end of the branch to him. ‘I can manage the rest.’

He had heard of this. Her name was Hutchence. She lived three miles out on the Bowen road, not in a hut but in a real house, and regularly had a load she wanted carrying or a job out there she wanted doing. The boys and young men of the settlement, Hec Gosper, Jake Murcutt, the older Corcorans, went in dread of being collared and dragged off to dig a ditch or lift a piece of unwieldy furniture. George had believed he would be exempt; that she would see at once, even if she did not recognise him, that he was not a farm boy like the Corcorans or Hec Gosper, to be hailed and commanded. But when it happened he couldn’t see how he could protest without appearing foolish; he found himself, as mildly as any other youth of the place, pocketing his book, swallowing whatever mild affront he felt to his dignity, and dragging along beside her.

The branch was heavy, he wondered how she had come so far with it, but he was strong, it gave him no trouble. Only he sweated in his heavy jacket and had, more than once, to stop and mop his brow.

‘It’s alright,’ she told him. ‘You take your time. George – is that what they call you?’

She was a tough old body, not quite what she appeared. Though she had too much of the domestic about her to be a source of mystery, he could see quite well that she might present a puzzle. No one knew where she came from – that is, she had vouchsafed no information – or how she could afford to build a real house, or why of all places she had chosen to do it here, or what relation she bore, if any, to the young woman who lived with her, whose name, he knew, was Leona. They had come down, it was said, from the Islands, from Macao, or maybe it was Malacca, and while their house was building had roomed with a widow in Bowen – though no one knew anything of them in Bowen either, save that they
had come on the steamer with a whole household of furniture, real furniture of a kind people had never seen, carved chests, wickerwork lounges, three or four elaborate birdcages, and seemed quiet and respectable enough, except for the accent, which the older lady had and the younger did not.

When the house was finished whole troops of people had come out from Bowen to see it; some because it was such a wonder – Bowen, for all that it was a town, had nothing like it; others in the hope that the house, once it was set up, with all the cane chairs in place and the carved chests there to be opened and shown, and the beds made, and one or two pictures hung, might solve the mystery at last by giving away what the ladies themselves would not. But they were disappointing even in this. The house might have flown through the air and landed, plump down, from some seaport up north that they had barely heard of, it was so unlike anything you would see here. If it had information to give away, they couldn’t fathom it. It was in a language they could not read.

It was very light and airy, very open. The cane furniture gave it an easy look, but worried them. A chair ought to be solid. All this lacy lightness suggested – but there they were baulked. Their minds stopped short. They sat in the chairs, and from that vantage looked around at the tongue-and-groove walls, which were mostly bare, but no answer came to them. Was it the past or the future they were looking at? If the past, it was not their past. If the future – well, on the whole they did not care for it. Nor did they care for the fact that Mrs Hutchence, once she was in her own home, turned slovenly, as she had not been when she lived at Mrs Blaine’s. Her bombazine was all spattered with mud, she wore boots –well so did they, most of them, but
they
didn’t live in a house with five rooms plus verandah, with furniture of woven cane, and serve tea in china cups,
bone
china, Bavarian it seemed, or have a daughter or goddaughter, or niece perhaps, or companion, who wore her hair with a comb in it and looked like a large, dark-eyed doll.

Some echo of this had already reached George; so had the
opinions of one or two local youths who, for reasons they could not have explained, had at sight of the house felt indignant, as they hadn’t been when the old girl first got hold of them. That had been a kind of joke; they had had the advantage of their youth, and of her accent and plain oddity. But the house, floating six feet above ground on its stumps, the cool superiority with which it lay claim to light and air, not to speak of the landscape it stood in, evoked a sense of raw inadequacy in them.

There was an ironwork scraper at the door. They watched and then looked away as Mrs Hutchence dragged her boots across it.

Inside, polished floors that met the soles of their feet with a disturbing stickiness. Most of all, the young woman, the niece or daughter, Leona, whose manner and dress, they had to admit, were wonderful, though none of them could venture what age she might be: ‘Thirty at least,’ they scoffed when they told of the visit afterwards. She had insisted they sit up at the table, their youth now a cheap handicap, though they were defiant in it, to talk while they drank tea.

Most of them went just the once and turned the occasion, so far as they could manage, into a joke in which it was the house and its two female inhabitants that had been on the wrong side of things. They did not mention the humiliation of the scraper or the strange mixture of embarrassment and wonder that had come to them when they looked back and saw the prints they had left, big-toed and dusty on the boards. If Mrs Hutchence hailed them now – she never forgot a name or face – they went suddenly deaf.

‘Well, here we are.’

And there it was, not at all as grand as rumour had it, rather raw and unfinished with its unpainted, corrugated iron roof, but a real house nonetheless, sitting in a patch that had been cleared and scuffled and in the fierce heat was already sprouting weeds.

The columns that supported the verandah roof had bevelled edges, and someone had taken the trouble to give them squared-off capitals. Walls of crisscrossed lattice were
set in the arches between, and on either side of the wide wooden steps stood urns, empty as yet, but classic and garlanded.

He dragged the branch, as Mrs Hutchence directed, into the half-darkness under the house, then, surprised to hear a scurry of footsteps overhead, followed her up the steps to the verandah, then on into the cool interior, which he saw, with a start of emotion, was a real room, the first he had been in for more than a year. It was like stepping back into a dream place, though the wicker chairs and little bamboo stands made it too exotic to be familiar. The nostalgia it evoked in him was for a place he might have read about and only imperfectly imagined. So it was a shock when she led him through into the kitchen and he found that of the party they were interrupting, which immediately fell silent, all its members, save one, he already knew.

Gemmy Fairley was there with the two little McIvor girls, also Hec Gosper, who coloured and immediately assumed, George thought, a hostile air; and standing at the entrance to the corrugated iron recess where the stove was set, Miss Gonzales, as Mrs Hutchence called her before she gave the young woman her other name, which it seemed he was invited to use. ‘This is George,’ she told them.

‘Abbot,’ he felt obliged to add.

Hec Gosper dropped his chin to hide a smile. The two little girls, who looked very uncomfortable, pushed their noses into their tea mugs. Gemmy, with a helpless gesture and sounds of inarticulate explanation, pushed past him and fled.

‘George has been a great help,’ Mrs Hutchence announced. ‘Sit down, George. I found a nice piece of firewood, Leona, and George very kindly offered – a cup, Janet. You can choose, pet. Any one you like.’

He seated himself at the pine table, and Hec Gosper shifted to make way for him but remained unfriendly. The older of the McIvor children brought a good teacup and saucer, though the others, he saw, had mugs. Hec Gosper saw it too.

‘Well,’ he said sulkily, ‘I better be off.’

It was Leona who restrained him.

‘Dear me, why? Mr Abbot won’t mind our bit of fun, will
you Mr Abbot? We’re all very easy here. We’ve been telling fortunes –’

Hec Gosper blushed furiously. The truth was that he had, till now, been the centre of such gallantries as the afternoon demanded and had acquitted himself pretty well, he thought. He was mortified that he should now be shown up before this
schoolteacher
. The fortune-telling was all nonsense, an excuse for Leona and him to play little games with one another that the McIvor girls, he thought, were too young to observe.

He was wrong in this. That was because
he
was too young. Janet knew only too well what was going on, and was fascinated, because Hector, she knew, was not much more than seventeen, whereas Leona, as far as she could work out, was – well, twenty-five at least. She knew this because when she was helping Mrs Hutchence down at the hives, Mrs Hutchence talked, and was full of stories about this place and that – they had moved about a good deal – which, if Janet had been able to put them together, would have afforded her larger glimpses of the two women’s lives than anyone else had been party to, only she did not have the experience quite to form a picture of travelling gentlemen, some of them ships’ captains, or billiard tables, or cooks who had no idea of what Brown Soup should be. She was more occupied, just for now, with the
things
Mrs Hutchence had to show: her china, which was bone china, which meant that when you held a cup up to the light by its delicate handle you could see through it; or the bolts of coloured silk the camphor wood chests were crammed with. These chests were themselves marvellous. They were carved all over with figures so raised that you could close your eyes, trace them with a finger, and still see processions through gardens of cherry trees and willows, with birds among the leaves, and little far-off pavilions.

‘Well,’ Hec Gosper said, reluctantly accepting to remain and see the thing through. Taking the tin mug in his fist, as if to make clear that he knew, only too well, how he had been slighted, he hid his discomfiture, and his lip, which he suddenly felt the mark of.

Leona saw the trouble he was in. She took the mug he had set down, gave him a look that might have been conciliatory
but might also, he thought, be a provocation, and poured him tea from the big blue china pot she hauled from the stove, and as she did so, leaned down and whispered in his ear. Only then did she fill the teacup for George.

‘Silly!’ That was what she had told Hector in her half-whisper, though they all heard it, and you could actually see the glow that came to the boy’s soul. Janet did. She was fond of Hector, and not very fond, after all, of the schoolteacher.

There was a little rise of tension in the room. Leona, standing very tall beside the table, long-necked and with her hair darkly braided, was as overdressed for the occasion, George thought, as he was. They made a pair.

Her frock was of light cotton. ‘Freshly laundered’ was how he thought of it. Its blue lifted his heart. But his chief impression was that she was scented, and he associated that with the little half-opened rosebuds, pink on white, with which her wide collar was embroidered. The smoothness of the fine-drawn stitches moved him. They spoke of refinements he had thought he might never see again, and as he stared at them, and at the slight lifting of her breasts, he felt once again how isolated he had been in the last months, what a savage he had become. He was happy now to let some of the daintiness of those miniature emblems of ‘garden’, ‘summer’, ‘home’, which he had so much missed, attach itself to the girl; the Englishness too, though her complexion was too dark for it.

Leona wavered. A crease came to her brow. He was something new, this schoolmaster. Even if he was at first sight more awkward than some others, Hector for example, he had a background, he knew something of the world. It embarrassed her that she had been caught out in a game with children, for Hector too was that, however he might stroke his moustache and swagger.

George sensed the little catch of interest in her and felt his confidence lift. If he was let down by anything it was the state of his shirt-cuffs, which were very grubby. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down to hide them, and noticed, as he did, the dirt that was ingrained in the knuckles of his big hands – even Hector’s, he saw, were cleaner. How careless he had allowed himself to become! His hair, for example. He ran
his hand through it. It was a bird’s nest; whereas Hector’s – Hector was altogether, for all his overgrown limbs and the harelip, very neat, and was not barefooted but wore flash new boots.