The Secret River (38 page)

The fellow had got him to stand with the little table from the
parlour beside him, took pains to get him to a look
a little off to the
side, a little more, just look at the corner of the mantle, if you please, sir
. There was pleasure in being called sir by a gentleman with a tripos from Cambridge, even if he knew that William Thornhill was what they called here an old colonialist, which everyone knew was polite for
old lag
.

While the gent in his houndstooth peered and dabbed, he made delicate inquiries about the history of his client, and Thornhill obliged.

This story had William Thornhill not born in dirty Bermondsey but in clean Kent, by the chalk cliffs. Had not been caught greasy with fear at Three Cranes Wharf, sweating over pieces of timber belonging to Matthias Prime Lucas, but by the excise men on some pebbly beach with a boatload of French brandy. Had not swung for it, because on the outward trip he had worked for the King, carrying English spies into France.

It was a well-made story, every corner of its construction neatly finished, as it had come to him from Loveday, whose story it had been. No one was the poorer for the theft. In this place, where everyone had started fresh-born on the day of their arrival, stories were like those shells down on the beach. A crab might live in one for a while, until he grew too big for it, and then he would scuttle around to another, the next size up. Loveday had found a new story, too, involving a young girl, a cruel father and a false accusation. He was not going to ask for his old one back.

Sal looked at her husband sideways as he spoke to the gentleman from Cambridge, out of the side of his mouth so as not to spoil the pose. Under her gaze he added a moonlight elopement with the daughter of a well-to-do shipowner, and she said nothing.

But the gentleman from Cambridge painted a poor picture. In wishing to ingratiate himself with his employer—perhaps hoping for more commissions, of the six children perhaps, and the wife too—he modelled the image on the best specimen of
manhood with whom he was familiar, to wit himself. So Thornhill, built on a big scale, was portrayed as a delicate fellow with one bony knee propped forward in an unlikely way, a pretty head with hair curling around the ears and a watery look on his face.

One hand held a book half-open. Thornhill had wanted the book, but there had been a look of distaste on the Cambridge man’s face as he arranged his customer’s fingers into the pages. The scoundrel had tried to make a monkey of him, for it turned out that the book was upside down. Everyone pretended it was an oversight, but Thornhill could not bear to see the thing in front of him. He paid up without a murmur, the way a gentleman would have done, but no portraits of the children and the wife were suggested.

Loveday recommended a man who could do another, an
old
colonialist
like himself.

Upton’s portrait had taken him by surprise.

He was sitting by the table in his cutaway coat. Upton had got him to hold the telescope but in a way no human had ever held a spy-glass before, prissily, along his wrist. He regretted not having insisted on some better arrangement. Tell the truth, he was not sure about the whole business of having a glass in a portrait. He wondered whether it revealed something about him that would expose him to ridicule, the way the upside-down book had.

It was an odd uncertain look that Upton had caught. The picture was the sum of all the things that had ever happened to him. He could see there was a hardness there, but there was some other thing too, a bafflement. It was the picture of a man puzzled by what life could turn up.

~

The
Gazette
had run a piece about the day up at Blackwood’s. In her slow reading-aloud voice, that distanced itself from the words it was saying, Sal told Thornhill what it said. The natives had
been guilty of depredations and outrages. There had been an affray and the settlers had dispersed them.

It was not exactly false. Nor was it quite the way Thornhill remembered.

The
Gazette
did not mention the woman Thornhill could not forget, baring her teeth at him in the gloom, the blood so bright on her skin. Or the boy, arching like a fish against the hook in Sagitty’s damper.

When he arrived home after the great bonfire—they had had to pile wood on it all day and into the night to get the job done—she was waiting for him, holding the lamp up so it cast a long black band across the wall behind her. She had got the things ready, put everything into bundles, made a stew out of all the salt pork that was left.

He told her the story: the parley-voo, the showing of the guns, the dispersing. She listened in silence.
There won’t be no more trouble,
Sal
, he said at last.
As God is my witness
. Her eyes searched his face so that he had to look away, pretending to be busy taking off his jacket.
They gone for good and all this time
, he said, as casual as could be.
No need for us to go anywhere just yet awhile
.

She put the lamp on the table and stood for a long time with her back to him, staring into its flame.
I hope you ain’t done nothing
, she said at last.
On account of me pushing at you
. He could hear her recoiling from the words even as she spoke. He rushed in full of cheer:
What are you on about, Sal?
But she was clanking away now at the fire, getting the kettle out of the coals. Whatever words he threw at her, and whatever cheerfulness he summoned, she was not going to hear. She turned from the fire with the kettle and filled the basin.
Here, Will, give your hands a wash
, she said. Her voice was ordinary enough, but she would not look into his face.

He had washed his hands and face clean in the river before he had walked up to the hut, and up at the First Branch before that. Had made sure to get all the blood out of his clothes. Had even
torn the tail off his shirt, where the blood would not come out. But now he wound his hands over and over against each other, slippery with soap, and plunged them into the water. He felt her watching them as if they were her own. She still did not look at his face, even when he took the towel from her, even when she dished him out a plate of stew.

He wished that she would speak, but she said nothing. Not then and not later. He would even have welcomed an accusation. If she had accused, he could have replied. He had his answers ready. But she never did. She unpacked the bundles and put the curios back in the rafters. She hung the engraving of Old London Bridge back on its peg and spread the blankets out again on the ground. She put up the drying-line again, and sang all the London songs to the children. She went about her life as she always had.

She continued to make the marks on the tree, but the idea of going Home gradually became vaguer. When Dolly got a fever and had to be nursed day and night, Sal was too busy to make the marks, and when the child was up and running about again, she did not go back to the tree. A season passed, the tree shed its bark, and the lines showed up less sharp than before.

Thornhill noticed, but said nothing. It was part of the new thing that had taken up residence with them on the night he had come back from the First Branch: a space of silence between husband and wife. It made a little shadow, the thing not spoken of.

He was not sure what she knew. Mrs Herring might have known the truth: there was not much that happened on the river that she did not know. But Mrs Herring stopped visiting, and Sal rarely spoke of her.

But whatever Sal knew, or guessed, was with them and could not be shifted. He had not thought that words unsaid could come between two people like a body of water.

They were loving to each other still. She smiled at him from that sweet mouth. He took her hand to feel its narrowness in his
own and she did not resist. Whatever the shadow was that lived with them, it did not belong just to him, but to her as well: it was a space they both inhabited. But it seemed there was no way to speak into that silent place. Their lives had slowly grown around it, the way the roots of a river-fig grew around a rock.

~

The
Gazette’s
piece made no mention of Thomas Blackwood, who was still in his hut up on the First Branch. He was silent now, a big man slumped into himself, his shoulders hunched, his step fearful. One eye was a sunken closed-over thing, the other squinted painfully at shapes of light and dark.

Mr Thornhill, that good citizen and generous neighbour, made the trip along the Branch from time to time, tied up at Blackwood’s old jetty and went to the house with a sack of flour, some oranges off his tree, a pound of baccy. He would get the sack up onto his shoulder, his muscles straining, more used to watching other men hump and sweat now than doing it himself, and feel the attentive stillness of this place.

He would glance over at where river-oaks circled a patch of bare yellow earth beside the lagoon, marking where the bonfire had burned into the night. Something had happened to the dirt in that spot so that not as much as a blade of grass had grown there ever since. Nothing was written on the ground. Nor was it written on any page. But the blankness itself might tell the story to anyone who had eyes to see.

Blackwood would not speak to Thornhill, only sat with his head down. Thornhill’s words poured over him, a fall of rain that he was waiting to end. The hut was quiet with the sun beating down on the shingles. Each time Thornhill was there he listened for another person, a person who wore her nakedness like a gown, and the child with hair the colour of straw. He heard nothing, and could not ask.

With Blackwood in the hut was Dick. Others spoke piously of how good William Thornhill was, and his wife too, sending their son along to help poor Tom Blackwood. Toadying, he recognised. They wanted to stay on the good side of William Thornhill, who was too rich a man to make an enemy of.

He did not put them right on the matter of Dick. In fact, the boy had not told either of them that he was leaving. He had gone by himself one day some time after the affray. Still a young lad, he had paddled across the river on a log and then walked all the way along the Branch till he got to Blackwood’s. When Thornhill went up to find him, the boy only said that he would stop here along of Mr Blackwood for the time being.

And, while Blackwood could not meet his eye, Dick would not.

Dick scratched around in Blackwood’s fields, growing enough to keep the still going. He was eighteen now, and could manage Blackwood’s old dory to deliver the rum up and down the river. Now and then he pulled in at Thornhill’s Point and went up to see his mother, but never when his father was at home. Thornhill saw him on the river from time to time, standing up in the stern pulling on the steering-oar while the tide pushed him along. He had made a good waterman, after all. Thornhill stared and waited, but the boy never even glanced towards his father. Thornhill saw only the back of his head, in an old cap, and his shoulders, broadening with muscle. He was becoming a man, but had chosen to do so without assistance from his father. There was a tightness in Thornhill’s chest as he watched the dory glide up the river and out of sight. He had lost something that he had never known to value it until it was gone.

Newcomers did not know that he was William Thornhill’s son. Once he even heard them talk of him as Dick Blackwood. It gave him a shocked feeling, like the cut from a razor. There was the moment of cold nothing where the open flesh could be seen, and then the ache came on.

~

Of the blacks, Long Jack was the only one left on that part of the river. Such others as there might have been had retreated to the reserve that the Governor had set aside at Sackville, and lived on what the Governor was pleased to provide. It was thought they would die out. They did not seem to have the constitution needed to succeed. Those who did not die would marry among the lesser kind of whites. Learned gentlemen had announced that the blackness would be bred out in a few generations.

The learned gentlemen did not go to the Sackville Reserve to look, but if they had they would have seen that they were wrong. The place was full of children running and calling everywhere, and even if some of them had lighter skins than others, there was no mistaking that they were part of the tribe. In spite of everything, it seemed that the blacks were not going to disappear.

Smasher’s shot had not quite killed Jack. The place on the side of his head where bone as well as skin had been blasted away could still be seen. It had bound itself together lumpily. The shot had done other damage too, that had left one leg dragging and his whole body crooked and effortful, warping sideways as he moved along. There was something wooden about his face now. The shot had broken him in some central way so that his face showed nothing: no pleasure, not even pain.

He sat by a little fire around the point, where he had once, in another life, exchanged names with Thornhill. Sal had taken him on as something of a project. A penance, it had occurred to Thornhill. She gave him clothes: an old pair of britches that had once been her husband’s, and a jacket that had plenty of warmth left in it. She even knitted him a pair of stockings and a woollen cap. At her urging, Thornhill set aside a patch of ground for him, fenced it nicely, and gave him some tools and a bag of seed. Even had his men build him a snug hut, and Sal had come down to give him a pot and a kettle, and shown him how to boil up a dish of tea and how to do a damper just right.

But he never put on the britches or the jacket. In cold weather he wrapped himself in his old possum-skin cloak. The clothes lay out in all weathers, decaying into the dirt. One of Sal’s stockings had blown into a bush where it flapped in the wind. He never picked up the tools or even stepped through the doorway of the hut. The damper Sal had made, showing him how, had remained on the ground until the rats and possums finished it off. He sat by his fire, on the dirt, with a humpy nearby. He came and went, sometimes arriving at the back door to beg victuals, although never when Thornhill was about. At other times he would disappear for weeks on end, until the Thornhills would agree that he must have gone to join the others at Sackville.