Wanting (6 page)

‘One might almost say,’ she said to Sir John when he finally caught up to her at the cemetery gate, ‘her body thinks.’

Sir John’s body, on the other hand, gave no more appearance of an active intelligence than a well-tended pumpkin. Yet Lady Jane had long sensed there was within him some mechanism or spirit, some passion, waiting to be set in motion. In private she had at first called him Bear, because that was how she imagined him: a great bear in hibernation. But over a decade into their marriage, she was still waiting for him to awaken, as she fluttered moth-like around his eminence.

Small as he was large, Lady Jane might perhaps have been beautiful had she chosen to highlight her features. But it was as if she retreated from them. And if that were not exactly the case, it was true that her nature was permanently at odds with itself. Her desire for conformity
and approval, which she had inherited from her mother, the daughter of impoverished gentry, was at war in her with the vitality and belief in self that she learnt from her father, a northern midlands mill owner. Like her mother, she had married to better herself, settling on an ageing polar explorer who was, at the time, being lionised by London society as the nation’s greatest since Drake and Raleigh; like her father, she came to see that Sir John’s dullness, as with coal, was only good if it could be burnt to power something larger.

She talked to him of history, landscapes, picturesque ruins and her sensation of vertigo when, as a child, she gathered with vast crowds of the lowliest of London to watch Byron’s funeral parade and thought she might fall forever. He replied with reports of navigation, Admiralty regulations, auroras, and how delightful reindeer tongues were to eat when properly cooked, the skin peeling off like a sock. They had nothing in common other than a respect for ritual. The prospect of eating something redolent of feet notwithstanding, she liked his seriousness, which she mistook for an achievement in which she might share.

But he was boredom from the beginning, and if it was difficult to square the romance that surrounded his name with the torpor of his company, it was clear that he was malleable and that she could become the principal creator of his reputation. She resolved to be both his muse and his maker.

Lady Jane’s aspirations came from the same source as her shame and her energy: her father. Intimacy between
herself and Sir John she had discouraged from early in their marriage. It disgusted her, his sounds and flesh and face, and reminded her of all that she had devoted her life not simply to forgetting but to burning out of her being with experiences of a higher nature. Occasionally he forgot himself and was captive to his basest urges: at such times she believed herself exemplary in her tolerance of the revolting bestiality that is man. She endured his clumsy dull repetitions, the finger exercises of one tone-deaf to flesh. She came to see men as weaker—depraved, certainly—and in servitude to an uncontrollable animality, which was only the more mocking in her case because it had never resulted in a living child.

And so she believed in him: because she had no other choice, because she was already ageing, and because after her initial disappointment with both his dreariness and his lack of vigour, she found him unexpectedly amenable to being dragged along in the wake of her ambitions and passions. His chief virtue, she came to realise, was endurance. It was this that had enabled him to survive the horrors of the Arctic in his famed expeditions of 1819 and 1821, and it was this that made him go along without demur or comment with all her dreams and plans. He was her dancing bear.

For this reason, he offered no resistance to her various schemes, which included a plan to rid Van Diemen’s Land of snakes by paying—out of their own pocket—a shilling for every skin brought in; until, £600 poorer, with snakes still abundant and the previously unknown profession of snake
breeder firmly established, the scheme was abandoned. And though he had no interest in it, for the same reason he had agreed to visit the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island. Lady Jane had declared the Van Diemonian Aborigines there a scientific curiosity as remarkable as the quagga roaming free in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes. And so the vice-regal party now found itself sitting down to dinner in the Protector’s cottage, while listening to the Protector’s grand and—it had to be said—rather lengthy tales of his historic mission of conciliation.

‘His was the kingdom of the great mountains and wild rivers,’ the Protector was saying as the plates of the second course, roast wallaby, were taken away. ‘The sylvan forests and sublime beaches of western Van Diemen’s Land.’

Believing heft was created in spaces of silence, he had learnt to hold a table by pauses as much as by speech, confusing the politeness of others with growing rapture. He let his gaze sweep up and down the distinguished party seated at his dining table that evening—Sir John, Lady Jane, a half-dozen flunkeys and lackeys—and then his own court: his son, his wife, and the Catechist, Robert McMahon, who, since the tragic drowning of his pregnant wife while disembarking in a wild storm, dressed in the filthiest rags. Did any of them, the Protector wondered, have the slightest idea what work it was to create such a grand tragedy with yourself at its very heart?

‘He was a king, you see,’ he said finally, raising a hand
to amplify his grand tone, for it was as if he were talking of places and people long since lost to another epoch—the Middle Ages, the Norman invasion, Viking axes glinting dawn sun down a river mouth—worlds only vaguely divinable through a swirling maelstrom of myth and lofty phrases. And though all knew well that he was talking about people and events not even a decade old, it was, the Protector realised, already another era, and he was both its Norseman, its final destroyer, and its Bede, its only chronicler.

‘And you intended remaking such fallen emperors here as stout yeoman?’ asked Lady Jane. ‘Does science, Mr Robinson, allow of such things?’

The Protector had begun what he termed his ‘friendly mission’ with a vague hope hardly worth calling an ambition. He was possessed by a desire he could scarcely grasp. After it ended, he did not understand what had happened. One world had ended and another begun, and he was no longer moving through that old world in wonder, but trapped at Wybalenna, in a new horror he could not escape. He smiled. He held out his hands.

‘God decrees such things, Ma’am. How can science disallow it? Besides,’ he continued, ‘he were much attached to me. First met him in 1830.’

He said this as though it had been in a newly fashionable London club. But this monarch was not sitting in some darkened corner of the Athenaeum in the heart of the greatest city in the world. Nor was he known as King Romeo, a name he would only be given by the Protector
in another time in another world, an absurd, upside down, bastard imitation of England. The story the Protector went on to tell was of courage and nobility, the childlike fear of savages, the tale of a family finally saved. But King Romeo’s true story was something entirely different.

Then, his name was Towterer. He was standing atop a boulder scree on an unknown mountainside in the middle of a vast, unmapped wildland. Maps were, of course, unknown to him. And if he had been shown one, he would have thought it ridiculous. For he lived not on an island, but in a cosmos where time and the world were infinite, and all things were revealed by sacred stories. He was a tall, powerfully built man, careful and wary, and over one shoulder he wore a white kangaroo skin. Heading towards him along a distant ridgeline was a party of men whose coming he had feared, but of whom he was determined not to be frightened. The sacred stories foretold no tragedy; and besides, he trusted in his own guile.

Then, the Protector was not yet the Protector. Though a handful hailed him by another moniker as the Conciliator, most whites knew him as George Augustus Robinson, a name the blacks abbreviated in their fashion to Guster. And it was while dreaming of himself as the Conciliator yet answering to the name of Guster that Robinson, in company with his band of tame blacks, now advanced up the ridgeline to parley.

Cold rain blew hard, Robinson’s party were lousy
with vermin, and their low spirits were compounded by a loathsome distemper. They had for a month made their way through that astonished earth with the intent of bringing in the remotest tribes, but had captured none. They had forced passageways through cold rainforests, lost themselves in cloudgardens of hanging mosses ribboning the sky, trekked along vast beaches stunned by angry oceans that rose and fell like liquid mountains, climbed ranges aching with desolation at the endlessness all around. But only now, as they greeted the tall black man, did it seem their luck had changed.

Towterer was cautious in his reply, saying little, but he made Robinson and his party welcome. He took them into a gully, along a creek and to a forest clearing, in which was a village, typical of the western tribes, formed of a small collection of thatched cupola huts that could each house up to twenty people. Yet Towterer’s band was only thirty strong—or thirty weak, depending on how one viewed it. Perhaps, Robinson had thought, the white man’s plagues that were laying waste to the blacks in the settled districts in the east had already arrived, a hideous harbinger of his arrival.

The rain slowed, then ceased altogether, the clouds gave way to a night sky studded with stars, and a large fire began to roar. The natives felt Robinson’s limbs all over, trying to ascertain if he had bones, if he were a ghost. They made him blacken his face, as though this somehow made him acceptable. Then all the blacks, wild and tame, began dancing and singing in the forest. Finally Robinson gave in
to their cajoling and, though awkward and embarrassed, joined in. An aurora swept across the southern heavens, waves of pure spirit, roiling bands of red and green light that rolled through the universe. Towterer became insistent that Robinson take off his clothes. Overcome by a logic he didn’t understand, Robinson stripped.

He was momentarily beset by the terrifying idea that this was what he truly desired in life. Naked, he found himself leaping, stamping, flying, lost in a strange abandon beneath the southern lights. Was this his true reward, rather than the money he would be given if he brought all the natives in?

Later he would recall it as ridiculous, but then, as he leapt and yowled, as the flames flared and he felt their disturbing heat on his naked thighs and groin, he did not know, he could not say. That night the universe had flowed into him, he was open to everything, he was alive to other humans and to himself in a way he had never known. That night he felt suspended between the stars and the mountains, the forests and the fire. The dance was dizzying, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. It made no sense. It was beyond understanding. For a moment—perhaps the only moment in his life—Robinson felt freed into something beyond himself.

It could not last.

When he had gone to his tent and saw Governor Arthur’s letter of commission folded at the front of his diary, Robinson was abruptly reminded of what was expected of him and who he really was. The very reason
he was there would not allow any resolution of the matter other than his capture of these blacks and the bringing of them into a world in which he was only marginally more welcome than they. And all this was so he might make something of himself and his family, so he might rise and be celebrated as a man of standing and repute, welcome in the drawing rooms of polite society, a world where no one danced naked and no one opened themselves to others, and where all practised closing down themselves and everything around them.

He felt as doomed as his fellow dancers.

And as these thoughts had befuddled his brain, Robinson’s head grew heavier. His mind, ordered by religion, could only conceive of such disorder as heresy. He was filled with thoughts he knew were not just blasphemous but Satanic. He wondered if God existed only as the ultimate obstacle between a man and his soul. And then only the memory of the wild red light of the fire playing on all their bodies had remained, along with their strange chanting, and then he was asleep.

Robinson had woken suddenly before dawn, aware of an unpleasant presence. He sat up and instinctively turned to see a young native woman sitting behind him, at the head of his tent, clearly keeping watch on him. When he tried to shoo her away, she pointed with a long stick at the knapsack in which he had hidden his three pistols.

They had known all along.

How he rued carrying the pistols! They did not trust him, he realised, no matter how often he protested his
good intentions, his desire not to take captives, no matter how much tea and bread he fed them, no matter that he had even shed all his clothes and joined with them in their licentious nakedness. He had never intended turning the firearms on the natives—he had seen what a disastrous failure that had been. The pistols were purely for self-defence, for use in the final extremity.

His way was otherwise—persuasion, reason—because at the back of his arguments were always the men with guns anyway. Why flourish and fire them when others would do that for you? Robinson’s was one of many roving parties out in the bush looking for natives—but was his not the only one that promised life, not death?

When morning came, the women of Towterer’s tribe were gone. Towterer said they had gone fishing. But by nightfall they were still not returned. Towterer continued listening carefully to Robinson’s arguments as though the disappearance of half his people were of no matter.

Through the interpretation of his native lieutenant, Black Ajax, Robinson told Towterer how, in this war the Aborigines could no longer win, he was offering the last and only realistic option left: sanctuary on the islands of Bass Strait in return for their country. There they would be kept in food and provided with all the good things of the whites’ world: clothing, shelter, tea, flour, God. He was so persuasive he almost believed himself. On the second night, the forest again reverberated to their singing and dancing, Robinson again went to bed, and again he awoke abruptly before dawn.