A River Town

Eight

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, select a nondescript page of ruled letter paper and a nondescript plain envelope such as any cow-cocky might employ. And begin, printing in large letters, using a different slant of the hand from that you normally employ.

Once he’d taken this letter to the post office and dropped it into a box when no one was around, he felt he had done everything he could for Missy in both the temporal and spiritual realm.

Now he found himself reading shipping reports more closely than was usual. There were so many bomboras and reefs off the New South Wales coast, and onto one of them the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company’s SS Burrawong might some foul night blunder with his spouse.

An hour before sailing, when Tim was loading up the dray with Kitty’s trunk, Ellen Burke strolled across from old Mrs. Manion’s, a cousin of Old Burke’s, where she’d been staying since her father and stepmother left town. She carried an emu egg for Johnny and a knitted doll for Annie. She was well pleased with herself—this business of watching the Shea children had been her reason to remain on in Central. She had wanted to stay at the Commercial at her father’s expense, like her own woman. Like an actress on tour. Old Burke did not permit that.

“Do you like stews, Uncle Tim?” she asked Tim, smiling up from her place at the table where the children made a fuss of her. She had dark hair and fine brown eyes and a big-framed build, which all put the banal question: was she a beautiful young woman, or was she what people called arresting?

Kitty’s trunk still had things that were stuck on it in Cobh. Traces of her great exodus from the hearth of Red Kenna. An uneasy feeling to see it on the dray again, a place it hadn’t been in for the past seven or so years, since she arrived in the Macleay for good. Looking at it, he felt a baseless fear that perhaps a reverse migration might be on the cards. Why did she need such a big trunk? Half of it filled with food. She was going to sustain, build up and cosset her sister in the big port of Sydney, as well as having gifts for her relatives, the Rooneys of Randwick. That was another thing he knew only now to have been arranged. She had written to the Rooneys and got a reply. This had all been long-planned. A man should complain more.

So strange to drive her down Smith Street, the children and young Ellen Burke excited in the back, though Annie was cautious like him about proceeding so merrily to the ship and yielding up Kitty as if it were a festive matter.

Tim went aboard and paid one of the deckhands a shilling to help him get the trunk onto the deck. From the main deck he saw tall Captain Reid, whiskered like a parody of a coastal captain, leaning over the edge of the bridge. Tim and the sailor lifted the trunk, one on the front, one on the back.

“Christ, mister,” said the deckhand. “The normal load of boulders!”

“It’s the weight of absence,” Tim could have told him, but didn’t. Edging the great load aft past the crowd on deck, he knew that there would be no adequate or calm good-byes. Mr. Alfred Howe’s Travelling Variety were all—he was horrified to see—on board, returning to Sydney to pick up a train or ship to some other bush community. Some of the performers had yellow waistcoats, and others wore plaid, just like the Sydney swells, the pushers of the Rocks. The women had flouncey skirts and looked as if they’d been drinking to ready themselves for the voyage. Thank God he’d insisted on paying for the saloon. Kitty would have had to share steerage with smartalec commercial travellers, tumblers, and mandolin-players. And might have enjoyed it too much.

By the time he and the deckhand got the trunk below decks, the space in her cabin seemed full of Annie, Ellen Burke, Johnny who was somehow barefoot again, and dear dumpling Kitty herself. The cabin white and panelled with Macleay cedar. A middle-aged man and woman in there too, along with the two bunks and the hinged washing basin and fairly spacious portholes through which the vivid Pacific Ocean would glitter. The man stood side-on, and the woman sat on the bunk she had already chosen, the one aft as it turned out.

Both these people were well-dressed. He recognised them. Mr. and Mrs. Arnold from Sherwood upriver. Mrs. Arnold off to her niece’s wedding in Sydney, said Mr. Arnold, with an Old Burke haughtiness which said, “You wouldn’t get me leaving the Macleay for some flippant Sydney wedding.”

What he said in fact was, “I hope those damn aerialists and jugglers don’t keep you ladies awake all night.”

Later, deep in the night’s meat, Burrawong would need to pass over the Macleay bar at the New Entrance. In his temperamentally anxious mind, Tim could envisage a scene of disaster: the ship stuck there on the bar of sand which cramped the entry. The vessel then ground about by waves until beam-on to the crashing open sea. Seas fizzing over the decks. Mrs. Arnold and Kitty flying out of their bunks, colliding in the space between, struggling in darkness up a canting floor.

Annie and Johnny experimentally worked the hinge to the sink in which their mother would wash tomorrow morning in open sea. Ellen got some marks with Tim by saying, “Come up with me on deck, you kids.” Of course, that left the old Arnolds in place still. So he could only say the usual solicitous things said by husbands when overheard. “Well, you’ll be right here then?” If the thing named Burrawong twisted on the bar at the New Entrance, how could she be right? Her brown, lively, peasant eyes glimmered. For she was a traveller. He could tell she had by no means made her last journey.

On impulse he whispered, “If anything evil happened to you, I’d be no good for anything at all. Who would I find to go to for instruction?”

“Yes,” she grinned, very brisk. “You’d mistake the faces of girls in pictures, and there’d be no one to sort you out.”

She winked at him. He kissed her, aiming for her forehead but, because she moved, getting her cheek. She stood calmly in his embrace and patted his upper arm.

“You’re a good fellow,” she said.

“Bloody good batsman,” he murmured, and they laughed together.

A cockney steward came in and palavered all over Kitty and Mrs. Arnold. He and Kitty took to the corridor to get away from him.

“There,” said Kitty pointing up and down the panelled passageway. “That doesn’t look too rat-infested, does it?”

Out on deck, a clear night, no sign of storms. But the sea was a real meander away down the course of the Macleay. He would need to inspect the sky, to read its face, for some hours yet to know how the night would go.

Ellen and the children down in the bows, watching a drunken acrobat do pretty well with somersaults. There was some sad hooting from the direction of the bridge and the cockney steward came around the deck ringing a bell. Kitty pushed Tim gently.

“There you are. There you go now. You’ll find on the second shelf behind the counter a list of the three-month-old accounts. You need to say a word to a few of them.”

“Remember me to your relatives in Randwick,” said Tim.

“Remember you? You’ve never met them.”

“Then you can bloody introduce me by photograph. The one with the straggly moustache. The masher one.”

“Taken to impress them by the village-load back home. Look at our Tim doing so well in the new world!”

“That’s the very one.”

He had the strangest, unsettling yet admiring feeling that she had become so easily separate from him and the children. A woman sailing on her own behalf. There were a few caresses which afterwards he barely remembered. Exiled in his own town, he went ashore with Ellen and the children. Burrawong creaked and growled out of Central wharf, and there on the dark river, seen by the lanterns on the mast, stood Kitty with her elbows on the rails! Various of Mr. Howe’s Variety’s local friends were hooting and whistling from the wharf, but the hugeness of the river and the night absorbed them all at a gradual but relentless rate. Performers and wives alike. The lantern on the mast was very soon all that could be seen.

“Oh, well,” Mr. Arnold said beside him on the wharf. He sounded like a man delivered from a social duty, a civil event or even a funeral, who could now go and take a drink in peace.

“They’ll be fine, they’ll be fine,” murmured Tim like a prayer.

“It’s very crowded,” said Arnold in parting. “Must be seven dozen passengers at least. The bloody North Coast Steamship Company has a cheek!”

And then, the complaint hanging, he was gone.

How he felt, Tim understood, was an echo of how his parents had felt seeing them all go. A jealousy of the size of the earth and the enormity of the night. The idea that the sea holds, caresses, owns the travellers intimately.

During the walk home, Annie and he on more or less the same lines as each other remained wisely suspicious of events. Ellen Burke and Johnny had the holiday fevers. The little bugger went all the way down Smith Street walking on his hands. Howe’s Variety had had a dangerous influence on him.

At home, and just to deepen his mood, Tim went into the store while Ellen Burke washed the children and readied them for their motherless night. He sorted through the pile of overdues which Kitty had left for him to deal with. Amongst them was a politely wrathful letter from Truscott and Lowe acknowledging receipt of part payment of their account but pointing out the remainder was overdue, and that he should be prompt to avoid legal action.

These clients of his owed him the amounts Truscott and Lowe were dunning him for. Holy God, the Malcolms with nearly four months unpaid. Ernie would want to give you an award for bravery rather than pay you for sardines! Others. Grant the pharmacist, more than two months. Things not good in that household. Like young Baylor a pleasant man, but said to be another opium-eater—or drinker rather. Draughts of laudanum for some pain he didn’t state.

Well, these were two, Malcolm and Grant, to give a nudge to.

Midnight. Making reasonable time on a calm night, Kitty should now be safely over the bar, prone in her bunk, blinking at the dark.

That night, to reduce the world to size, he drank some of the brandy he had last broached with Constable Hanney the day Missy had been presented. He lay down with a sugary, thick head. Deep in the night he saw Burrawong in a sunlit sea which reason said it could not yet have reached. He yearned to be aboard the vessel, so happy did her situation seem to be with the ocean. For a better view he sat on the side of his bed.

Not unreasonably the door opened and his father, Jeremiah Shea of Glenlara via Newmarket, Duhallow, brought the girl Missy into Tim’s bedroom by the hand. His father creaking along in a rare mood of levity.

“There you are,” he said. “Dear God, what a lord! In your big wifeless bed in New South Wales.”

He gestured to the girl, who wore a veil as protection from the glare.

“Man could not have a better fellow pilgrim.” And, as never happened in the years before immigration, his father prattled on. “Miss, here’s my son?” Old Jeremiah said. A social creature now, a rabid introducer all at once.

Missy lifted her veil the better to inspect Tim. The gaze was level and yet properly restrained. She was the sober person, whereas Old Jeremiah would have fitted in with the half-stewed boys around the keg at the cricket match, or with Howe’s Variety.

“She knows your face,” said Jeremiah. “We all wonder about the name.”

What was his name? And he wondered why did she think it important?

“Bandy Habash,” he told Jeremiah and Missy as a ploy. He kept his real name from them, and turned the heat of their attention towards the hawker.

She said, “I’ll put the veil back down. I get my blemishes from being watched.”

Tim said, “I’m sorry.” But he saw that no blemishes marked her face.

“No,” she assured him. “Not your fault.”

“I’ve overdone the staring business myself,” his old man shamelessly admitted. “Well, the day goes on…”

Missy took the hint and turned to leave.

“You came by ship,” said Tim, staring past his father out into the broad sea and Burrawong set eternally in it.

“Well,” said Missy, who by her tone was used to being mistrusted. “You can ask them.”

She turned and vanished around a corner of darkness within which the blinding sea was framed.

His father remained to say, “How is it? Tell me.”

“I could be happy,” Tim meant to tell him. But the father did not wait for that answer.

Ernie Malcolm’s big plum-red brick place in West Kempsey had broad verandahs where, according to the builder’s fancy, Ernie and Mrs. Malcolm could sit on spacious rattan chairs and get the air off the river. Neither of them, of course, were ever seen at leisure out there. As Tim arrived, summer light slanted across the unfrequented boards of the wide porch. But that was not the trade entrance, the entrance to take when begging for money. Tim went to the back of the house to make his delivery. He hoped Ernie had not yet left for his office, for after the angry scene in front of the Good Templars he wished to see Ernie again, to gauge him, to have him accept and acknowledge an honest claim for payment.

At the same time, somewhere, at the core of the house, in an unimaginable cool place, pale and lovely Mrs. Malcolm waited for the summer to complete its course.

They had a maid, an old half-caste lady named Primrose, and she was the one who always took the deliveries. Primrose shuffled to the back door when he knocked. He asked her kindly to fetch Mr. or Mrs. Malcolm.

Old Primrose said Mr. Malcolm was already at the office. (Bloody Ernie so industrious!) She would have to go and see how Missus was.

She was gone so long that Tim thought—with some relief Kitty wouldn’t have approved of—that today he would not need after all to ask for payment, and put Ernie and his wife to any test. In daylight the urgency of the demand was mitigated… He could well wait a day or so before putting the hard word on anyone. He didn’t want people, especially an admirer of Alfred Lord Tennyson, to call him hungry, to lump him in and say, “They’ve always got their hands out, those fellows.”

But Mrs. Malcolm did all at once appear in the back area, near the kitchen and the curtained-off space where Primrose slept. Strands of her hair were coming loose from their ribbons, and though he had never imagined such a thing, it was understandable on a day like this, when any sane woman not on extreme personal display would feel entitled to let her hair stray. And yet there was something heightened about her. This was the further stage of the bewilderment she’d shown first at Bert Rochester’s funeral. He had never seen her face exactly like this though. It wasn’t a colour that could be explained by the heat.

“Tim,” she said, licking her pale lips. “Hello.”

She did not normally call him Tim. She was in fact as far out of her normal character as his father had been in the dream.

“Come into the dining room. Come! Come!”

He obeyed her, entering through the curtain she held aside and standing by her varnished table while she swayed by the hallway door.

“Would you like tea?”

Her head weaved about as if to cast up the possibility of tea.

“I don’t need any, thank you kindly,” said Tim, since he did not want to turn his shame at finding her like this into a social event.

“But Primrose,” Mrs. Malcolm called, “Mr. Shea must have at least a glass of water.”

Primrose appeared, went to the tap which came into the house from the water tanks, and poured Tim a lean tumbler of tank water. She held it up to the light.

“The wrigglers still in it, Mrs. Malcolm,” she told Mrs. Malcolm, inspecting the larvae which flickered in the water like tiny, luminous eels.

Mrs. Malcolm laughed greatly, walked up to inspect the glass, then sat at one of the chairs by the kitchen table.

“A man like Tim won’t mind those. A solid fellow and such a good batsman. You won’t mind them. Will you?”

He said not at all. He wondered aloud could he have a word. At an inexact nod from Mrs. Malcolm, Primrose disappeared out of the dining room and then through the outer door into the heat-hazed back yard and the cookhouse.

Tim reached into a pocket in his coat and brought out the Malcolm account.

“I hope you won’t mind this, Mrs. Malcolm. Your account is nearly four months overdue now. I just wondered if you could take the time to raise the matter with Mr. Malcolm. You see, it’s not me. But the Sydney business houses demand payment within three months at the latest. I’m very happy to extend good credit to you and Mr. Malcolm and I value…”

Mrs. Malcolm held up his explanations by raising her hand. She said, “ ‘I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: Borrowing only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable …’ ”

He must have been frowning and she laughed sharply. “Henry IV. We did both Parts I and II at the Brighton Town Hall on successive nights… Rather… rather neglected in the Shakespearian repertoire.”

“Oh yes. I’ve never actually heard the quotation before. But you always surprise me, Mrs. Malcolm.”

Never more than now.

“Don’t worry. I know your clients in the Macleay play on your good nature, Tim. I see it. I have an eye for it. It’s happened to me too. But I am abashed… abashed…”

She lowered her head and swung it from side to side. This was bad to see. He was certain that this was drink. Though at the cricket she had not taken even a sip of ale.

“Ernie should be doing this,” she stated. “Hell and damnation, Tim. He’s an accountant.” She started beating the table with the palm of her hand. “He should come to account.”

She stood up with a jerky suddenness.

“I shall get you the sum, Tim. What is it again?”

Ashamed, he read the amount of the bill.

“At once, at once,” said Mrs. Malcolm.

But she seemed hit by bewilderment or loss of memory, and so did not move. She made a whimpering, and raised her hand and put her forehead against the back of the palm.

Tim touched her elbow to get her moving, to bring her back to earth. “Please, don’t go to any trouble or be upset. I should have gone perhaps to Mr. Malcolm’s office.”

“Oh,” she said, “you don’t know what Ernie’s offices are. I, Mr. Shea, have been the object of them, and know well his offices.” She raised an index finger to her lips and let out a long sustained, theatrical shush. “I believe the petty cash is in the tea caddy. Pound notes with your name on them, so to speak. Housekeeping money. A second, Tim.”

She disappeared through the kitchen door, and he heard her stop for a while in the corridor, confused again. He could not follow her there though. “Oh well,” he heard her say.

He disliked anyhow the stillness of kitchens in the heat of summer days, when a woman had gone to count and get money, sometimes sighing as she came back with it. At these moments he felt that smallness threatened his heart. A commercial boredom drenched the air, and he felt he’d lost and betrayed the better part of his vocation in life.

It had been cleaner and more suitable when he had worked as a haulier. Everyone expected to pay hauliers.

Mrs. Malcolm tottered back with an antique tea caddy in her hands. She opened it and inspected the bank notes within. Then she selected and took out a five pound note and gave it to Tim.

“This is more than is owed,” said Tim, appalled.

Mrs. Malcolm’s head swayed again.

“No. We’ve put you to the inconvenience. We should now give you in simple decency an advance against our next account.”

“No, I’ll give you change.” He began to search in the leather bag in which he carried his delivery money. Mrs. Malcolm held out her hand, palm forward. It was pretty dramatic. Isabella telling the grandees to let Columbus have a go with his three little boats. Helen of Troy refusing to go home. Elizabeth the First rebuffing a gesture of affection from the Queen of Scots. Mrs. Malcolm uttered noises of denial too, which sounded like “Chut, chut!”

“But I didn’t ask for more than is on the bill.”

“I understand that. But I will be very offended if you try to slip the change to Primrose. That won’t be tolerated, Tim.”

“Then I’ll give you a receipt,” said Tim.

She did not object, and he got the receipt book from the pouch he carried and began to write. At the bottom of the receipt, he showed the credit of more than one pound, and underlined the sum. He tore out the page and gave it to Mrs. Malcolm.

“You will point out that receipt to your husband. A credit, see.”

“I can’t guarantee he’ll take notice,” she told Tim, an ordinary woman with the ordinary sourness she’d been forced to. “He has had a number of preoccupations.”

“I’m very grateful,” said Tim, straightening up from his work in the receipt book.

Mrs. Malcolm put her hand out temporarily, seeking an invisible object.

“You have three children to feed, Mr. Shea?”

“I have the third on the way, Mrs. Malcolm. April perhaps.”

“Ah, what a creation we are! Cattle for instance can’t state, do not know the terms of their pregnancies. They have to be told by the farmer.”

Tim did not know what to make of that. “I suppose that’s right, Mrs. Malcolm. What a work we are.”

But with the plain exchange of pleaded-for money done, he didn’t feel like much of a work of anything.

“We don’t have children, but as Ernie says we have the Masonic Lodge and the Good Templars, and the Macleay District Hospital Board, and the Board of the Cricket Club, and, of course, the Turf Club and the Patriotic Fund and the Royal Humane Society. And we keep accounts at as many stores as we can. Spread the wealth, eh. I suppose that in a way the storekeepers’ children are our children. By an indirect route. So we must be happy, I suppose.”

Ernie had talked like that at the cricket. It must be an article of faith of the Malcolm household.

“That’s a fair way of looking at it, Mrs. Malcolm,” said Tim. Now he wanted to escape, to take his embarrassment out to old Pee Dee, his confessor nag to whom he could mutter away as he drove.

She grabbed his wrist. Frantic suddenness. “I’d be grateful if you would look at it that way.”

“Of course,” he said. He would make any pledges if she’d let him go.

“Good,” said Mrs. Malcolm. “That’s guaranteed then.”

“Could I call Primrose for you, Mrs. Malcolm?”

She laughed at this. “I can find my way around my own house, thank you.”

“Of course.”

But she stood there, did not move further into the house, did not release him to the working day, the hard outside light.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose you’ve done your business, haven’t you, Tim?”

It sounded as if he were again being cast as a storekeeper in a variety sketch. Meanness, the vice you found in everyone, and everywhere in the hard-up bush. The copper tedium of coins coloured the soul.

“Far beyond the price of any grocery bill, there’s the friendship with yourself and Mr. Malcolm.”

“Oh,” she said. “Very well. Then you might as well go.”

He thanked her in a normal voice and took his hat and left. Outside, in heat like a blow on the back of the head, he passed the sterile verandahs where the dream of elegant Winnie and devoted Ernie sitting together in childless serenity on hot evenings had soured and gone stale. He passed out the TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE, untethered the cart and got aboard, Pee Dee waving his head from side to side in complaint. Tim spoke in the huge afternoon, into which longed-for thunderclouds had now come massing from the west. “Five pounds, you bugger! Gratefully received.”

Back to the wifeless store and hearth. Ellen Burke cooked a better bush-style breakfast than Kitty, and sandsoaped the kitchen table afterwards as a matter of course. So he would have been an ungrateful fellow indeed to complain. But the tidiness felt like the tidiness of someone else’s house, and the food like food from a stranger’s kitchen.

The store felt his, and so he minded it while Ellen exercised his permission to take the children for a walk.

An Aboriginal man, in a blue shirt and trousers tied with rope, appeared as the afternoon storms began and lightning reduced Belgrave Street to size. He looked around to be sure where he was. His feet had left on the boards the faintest trace of soft yellow dust. He had that damaged look: his eyes at odds with his face and with each other. A bad case. People sold them any old poison to drink.

“Mr. Shea,” the man said in a sharp-edged accent, half-cockney, half something left from before whites came to the Macleay. “I’d like a pint of methylated for cleaning things. And you got some of that rosehip syrup?”

They were barred from the pubs, and so they drank methylated spirits sweetened with syrup. That’s why the man had that look, as if his eyes were not part of his body but were floating, without reference to one another.

Tim said, “Not here, Jack. I don’t sell methylated for those purposes.”

Every other bugger did, so why should he be so fastidious and not a practical man?

“Mate, be a good feller to me!” the man pleaded. The thunder high above and wide out in the cow pastures seemed to jolt his head.

“No. Don’t you come in here asking for White Lady. I tell you that every time.”

The man went out muttering, and stood under the awning, looking to the left up Belgrave Street, to the right up Smith. His White Lady beckoned. His love. Visiting circuses always went out there, to the blacks’ camp. The circus midgets with their liquor to trade. The huge men with beards and breasts like women. Some townsmen too. Cheap delights. Black velvet, they were reputed to call it. God knows why. Such a luscious name for wretched townships of hessian and bark and iron sheeting. But how must it be for a fellow to see the half-castes trailing into town and see your features on the brown faces of the Greenhill children?

“White Lady, mate,” the natives said lovingly. It had brought quick ruin to blackfellers who hadn’t even seen white men until three score and ten years ago. The first of them a few convicts escaped out this way from Port Macquarie. They’d begun the long mix of blood. And the torment. And now everyone said the blacks would die out, that that was the world’s way.

The Offhand cheered one of his wifeless midmornings by coming in for Woodbines. A sparing smoker, he lit one shakingly in the shop and very politely went outside to hurl the spent match into Smith Street. Then he returned, puffing and trembling.

“A second great rescue for you, Tim. This time from the decks of Terara. The Chronicle reports many a bush cricket match, but this one will stand out in the telling. Children overboard! The two highest scoring batsmen dive in to save said children overboard! And one of the children saved is then runner-up in the wicket-hitting competition. Sublime!”

Tim began to laugh. “That’s Johnny. Born athlete. Only drawback is the little bugger seems to want to kill his father.”

“And then,” said the Offhand, “going on to a new topic. The courage of Mr. Artillery, Lancer, Mounted-Bushman, Light-Infantry, Horse-Guards Chance. It was good to have a few sane men there to say otherwise to him and his brethren.”

Tim felt a spurt of unrest. All right for the Offhand to volunteer to be sane or mocking or whatever he’d been. The mighty feared his powers of satire.

“I would have been better not to go,” said Tim. “It always comes back to loyal vows I would rather not take.”

The Offhand shook his head. “Tim, they will find it very hard to get up a loyal list or a disloyal list or whatever it is they want to get up. The civilised British value of free speech takes precedence over monarchs in my book, and I shall be saying so.”

They both watched through the glass as a white horse drawing a sulky pig-rooted while turning into Smith Street outside T. Shea—General Store. The horse did not send up much dust since the road was baked hard now, and after the intense storms it had grown quite hot again. They saw Meagher, a publican, beefy but with very fine, good-looking features, fighting with the reins, looking too heavy for his sulky.

“Ah,” said the Offhand, puffing away. “Tim, there’s a parable for you. How decency brings its own ruin!”

Meagher managed to wrench his horse and buggy around the corner, heading towards the Wharf Hotel, which he owned.

“He still walks with a limp you know,” said the Offhand.

Tim knew.

“No good deed goes without its proper punishment,” said the Offhand, smiling at that truth.

The events they were reflecting on concerned a man called Slater, who had been a heavy client of Meagher’s Wharf Hotel. The drink, as people curiously say, had got him. Mr. Meagher was a scrupulous man, and concerned for Slater’s wife and children. He’d begun returning money to the wife at her house in West Kempsey, saying that Mr. Slater had accidentally left it behind. Such delicacy of feeling on Meagher’s part was fabled. It was believed he’d done similar things before. Mrs. Slater had been revived by Meagher’s kindness. They had begun a romance.

Impossible for these things to happen in the Macleay without people finding out. When Mrs. Meagher discovered it, she took their son and daughter and went to live in Sydney. When drunken Slater found out, he attended the Wharf Hotel with an axe and hacked poor Meagher in the ribs and the hip. Arrested, of course, Slater was tried and shipped on Burrawong to Darlinghurst jail. Mrs. Slater moved away from the Macleay in acute shame, and Meagher was left with his pub. He limped around the bar, weary of the whispered jokes of drinkers. And whatever people paid him now, he kept. He did not try any straight-out refunds to the widows and orphans of those men good-as-dead who lived for grog. Because he had grief of his own, one good leg left, and barely half a life.

Dragging these mysteries behind him in tiny puffs of sun-glinting grit from the hard pavement, Meagher vanished out of sight and pretty much out of light, bound for his dark front bar.

“He’s been to Corrigan’s funeral,” said the Offhand. “Cousin of his. Does Meagher still take the Catholic sacraments, would you say?”

“He goes to Communion, but people point him out.”

“Well, where would this town be without pointings-out? And makings of loyal lists. It’s enough to make a scribe turn mischievous. I came to tell you. Look out for some mischief in tomorrow’s paper, Tim.”

The Offhand finished his Woodbine and stubbed out the nose of it and put it in his side pocket. He always did that. You’d see him handing them out by the fistful to this or that blackfellow from Greenhill. Charitable according to his means. Like poor bloody Meagher.

He could hear his children out the back, playing around the shed and paddock. Well-married, well-fathering Tim Shea. But without Kitty today. Dear God, the little buggers were making a noise. Even Annie shouting out some ditty. He’d go out the back and see what was exciting them.

In the shade of the shed, Bandy Habash and Ellen Burke sat together applauding a song Annie was singing in a reedy voice. Johnny doing his normal stuff, hand-walking and somersaults to entertain the hawker.

Here was a fellow he refused to be charmed by, the man he’d warned off so frequently. Yet the children had behind their father’s back been mesmerised into performing for the bugger. Here too the protector of his children laughed in the man’s company. Tim felt not only the anger of being betrayed but as well the instant fury Habash seemed always and at an instant to call forth in him. Certainly it was that Habash was a brown man, but most of all that he was an insinuator of himself into places, into roles, where Tim resented finding him. The image of Kitty in yellow cloth recurred to him as flaming proof of this.

Tim did not want his children to hear the full force of his anger. They were not at fault. Ellen was. Johnny sensed a change in his audience, saw his father, and stood upright and still.

“You and Annie go to the shop. Go on, go on. Tell any people that your papa’s coming. Go on!”

Annie stopped her singing, inspected him, frowned, and placed her hand in her brother’s. They went together. The duchess and the bloody vagabond. Bandy had risen from the log and looked crestfallen already, his face as smooth and as pausable as an infant’s. No flashiness to him though. An ordinary brown suit and an open collar. The girl displayed pursed, full lips and her brow was flushed as she stood. But she looked for her age a bit defiant as well. Her hands folded, but not contritely. Seventeen-year-olds were meant to be easily made contrite.

“You have been put in my charge by your parents,” Tim told her, “and I’ve put my children in your charge.”

Ellen Burke worked her tongue inside her jaws. Was she getting together the spit for an argument?

“Mr. Habash is a great friend of my family’s, uncle,” she said.

So that part of Bandy’s oft-repeated argument was correct.

“When he comes to Pee Dee, he’s allowed to camp in the home paddock.”

“Then,” Tim argued, “he’s got a better sight reputation at Pee Dee than he has here in town.”

Bandy stepped in between Ellen and Tim. “It is the case, Mr. Shea. I am not here on business. I am here renewing friendship.”

“You’re like the bloody hydra, Bandy. Kick one head and another arises to take you in the backside. And besides, you, Ellen! He wasn’t a hundred yards from the bloody door in the home paddock. He was beside you on a log.”

Tim again expected her to step back or turn away enraged, leaving him alone to chastise Bandy Habash if it were possible. But she stood up to him. She was ferocious.

She said, “We girls from the bush have an easier manner than women do in that terrible old place you all talk about all the time. I’m pleased I’m an Australian, and let me tell you, Ellen and Kitty came here to have an easier manner without being shouted at! I think you’re trying to suggest something else than manners though, Uncle Tim. And since you think I’m that sort of person, I’ll see the children fed, go to Mrs. Manion’s tonight, and wait there till the Friday coach up the river.”

“Jesus, you won’t! On your own responsibility? No.”

Ellen Burke marched off down the yard. Tim turned on Habash.

“Will you go?”

Bandy stood straight, spreading his fingers at his sides and then drawing them back into a fist.

“Mr. Shea,” he said pleadingly. “It seems I cannot do anything to suit you.”

“All the more reason to clear out to blazes. I don’t look to be pleased by you. I don’t look for you to break the bloody horizon more than is necessary.”

Bandy swallowed. “Yet the rest of your clan likes me, old chap. You think you do not need to look at me. But you are not ignorant like others. You understand that my God is your God and my prophets your prophets. And you can see that you and I are in the same club. For even amongst Christians there are the despised and the despisers. I would remind you of that.”

Ah. Cunning, cunning little bastard.

And he continued. “I may be a jockey the Turf Club won’t license, but it may happen, since these things do happen, that you will one day need me for a friend. What am I then to make of your hostility, Mr. Shea? Even a man of my equable nature can be tested too far.”

“Believe me to the limit, Habash! I won’t want anything you have.”

Bandy reflected on him a while and started to go, but Tim knew in his water that it wasn’t final. That the departure wouldn’t take. He knew it in fact before Bandy seemed to. And Bandy did turn.

“The fault is mine,” he said. “Miss Burke was not aware that there was any lack of amity between you and me.”

“Yes, but you knew it bloody well, and should have told her.”

“Miss Burke is faultless, and should be treated in those terms.”

He turned and stared at Ellen Burke, whose back was to him. She stood on the shady, eastern side of the cookhouse.

“We don’t punish women,” said Tim, proud of his manners, shipped from Europe and to the bush.

When Ellen would not return Bandy’s gaze, he walked defeated off down the lane beside the residence towards his wagon, which Tim could remotely see parked near Central wharf. A perverse image of their joint endeavours with poor Albert Rochester arose, and Tim felt regretful.

Ellen Burke stood between himself and the house and now turned, her cheeks plumped out with rage.

Trying to be conciliatory, Tim said, “Very well, you were not to know. But would your father and stepmother want the familiarity of a shared log? That’s all I’m saying.”

She went on regarding him from beneath the dark eyebrows her dead mother had given her.

“Naturally, it won’t go further,” he promised.

“But,” she said, not pointedly, not testy in a girlish way. Like a woman ten years older perhaps. “You’ll hold this over me.”

“It’s not my mode of doing business,” he murmured. She looked away but seemed to believe him. “Except, if you go back to Mrs. Manion’s, your father would know there had been an argument, and ask me about the cause.”

“So you will hold it over me.”

“No, but stay till Friday. If you like, stay till next week and meet Kitty’s other sister.”

She said, “You can’t turn it into a tea party as easily as that.”

“All right, don’t damn well stay.”

“You swear too much!”

“It’s an Irish failing.”

“Not only swearing, if you ask me!”

“You shouldn’t bloody sneer, miss. Your father came here without anything but a pair of hands.”

She said, “I have to see to the children.” And to show she was still arguing like an equal, “And you still have half an hour before closing.”

Though he intended to walk with her towards the residence, she made an officious and aggrieved detour towards the cookhouse. Feeling hollow now after his flaring display of anger, Tim turned through the residence and into the store where Johnny was, of course, chalking a wildly rendered tree on the floorboards, and Annie had climbed on the stool to extract cans of peaches from the shelf and fixedly build a pyramid with them on the counter. Tim didn’t have the steam left for an argument with blithe Johnny. He pushed the boy’s shoulder. “That again. You are a colonial ruffian who can’t be reformed!”

Annie stared at him, seeking with raised chin his permission to continue with her peach-tin construction. He smiled.

Kitty was on the sea off the Hunter River, and Sydney still a huge way south on a coastline of submerged ledges. She watched the sunset with Mrs. Arnold and perhaps drank for health and fortitude some stout brought to her by the Pommy steward on a tin tray.

The children stayed in the store, and he let them pursue their works. When the Central post office clock rang six, he closed the door, as the distant Parliament in Macquarie Street decreed. A curious thing—the power of such far-off authority. He was further from the New South Wales Parliament than the outmost Atlantic isle was from Dublin. How strange the consent of the citizen to government notices posted in the Argus. Rebellion was in his opinion not the mystery. Civic agreement was the mystery. Uncle Johnny and the other transported Fenians had misunderstood such things.

The door closed. He faced the house, the evening. Ellen Burke’s stew, whose smell warmly penetrated from the cookhouse, came like a pledge as far as the store, and would aid him. Stews made a man sleepy and served as a signal of the close of things. Ambition and industry unclenched themselves, were etherised by stew-aroma.

“How do you think that smells, eh?” he asked the children, who looked up at him in some wonder, some puzzlement, as if he were speaking to them in French. They took their stew when it came. Why mention it, though, while there were still peach pyramids to be built, boards to be profaned with chalk?

Tonight he was tempted to suggest to Ellen Burke that they ought all to talk at table as if it was Christmas. But perhaps that would increase Johnny’s giddiness, license his desire to be an entertainer. Tim could envisage how he might walk down the table on his hands, avoiding the vinegar cruets and the salt and pepper cellars by great concentration on the task.

Afterwards, settling with a somewhat water-stained volume of the London Illustrated News 1891 bought at the auction in Chance’s auctioneering offices from old Miller’s deceased estate. He liked these books, since they had the marks of the great flood upon them. The flood waters had read these pages too. The great brown, snaky Australian flood waters invading the genteel magazine. The news utterly out of date, of course, even by the standards of the Macleay. South Africa nine years back a minor cloud on the Empire’s remote horizon.

In fact in this volume, views of Uganda, newly ceded by Germany to Great Britain in return for Heligoland. Looked a bit like views of western New South Wales—wheat and sheep country.

Ellen Burke was settling the children in their bedroom. Later she would sleep in the screened-off bed on the back verandah. At the moment she did not seem to be punishing his son and daughter at all for the quarrel he’d had with her and bloody Bandy.

Someone was rattling and banging on the door of the store. He unlatched the storm lantern from its hook on the wall and walked out of the sitting-room to see to it.

At the door a man of ordinary height in an aged but well-tended suit waited. The cluster of rare acetylene street lamps at the junction of Smith and Belgrave Streets threw bright light on his right shoulder, but his square, hatted head was obscured.

“Yes?” Tim called through the glass.

“I wonder could you help me, old fellow,” the man said loudly, but then he lowered his voice so that it could not really get through the door glass. Tim therefore opened the door.

“Do I know you?” asked Tim.

“Perhaps. I just moved here with the bank. My wife’s having an important tea and—if the truth were told—gin party. To meet the locals. She’s out of biscuits and petit-fours and low on sugar. Does everyone on the Macleay eat like a bloody grasshopper?”

“It’s almost seven. Strange enough time to be having a tea party.”

“Know how it is. We’re a bit of a novelty and the guests won’t go home, and being newcomers who are we to tell them to?”

“You’re aware there’s a new law?”

“It’s a pretty poor state of human freedom when a man can’t get some shortbread and sugar for his wife’s party. Can a fellow come in?”

Tim opened the door just enough to admit the man. The man entered, pleasant-faced, smiling. Could of course be a first-class customer to have. Would no doubt want extended credit.

Tim asked him how much sugar and how many pounds of biscuits? Then stealthily weighed out the sugar from a bag beneath the counter into the scales. He went into the back storeroom where the biscuits were kept in their rectangular, insect- and water-proof tin cases. He weighed out the amount on the scales in there, put them in a paper bag, and then came out to the smiling man and weighed them on the counter scales as well. A conscientious storekeeper. Then he did a sum in his head and announced the amount the man owed him.

Without changing demeanour, the man produced an ornamental badge from the fob of his vest. He said, “I am an officer from the Department of Colonial Secretary. Our instructions have been to warn storekeepers of the new regulations via notice in local papers and then to enact punitive fines for violations. The fine as advertised is fifteen pounds.”

Tim leaned for a while against his counter. “Sweet Jesus!” he protested. “What a pernicious way of going about it! What was I to do?”

“You were to refuse to serve me. You may send the fine by telegraphic money transfer through any post office to the address on this form.”

The man handed him a penalty form already filled out. The name Timothy Shea was on it already, and the address.

“You had me as a bloody target!” Tim protested.

“Someone in the Commercial told me you were a pretty sentimental fellow, so I immediately put you down. It saves me time to fill out the summons first, and then you don’t have the aggravation of my presence in your store for longer than necessary. You can, of course, contest the summons in court, but it will be expensive, and I have the evidence.”

He lifted the sugar and biscuits and shook them by the necks of the bags which contained them.

“You could bloody pay me for them then.”

“No, these are forfeit. You should read the Act. Any sensible storekeeper would have it framed on the premises like butcher shops which have the Health Act on the wall. Then when plausible buggers like me come knocking, the storekeeper can point to the Act and say sorry.”

“I say bloody sorry all right,” said Tim fervently. He wished Kitty was here to give this fellow her style of treatment. Men were frightened of her contempt.

Bereft of her, Tim went to the door, opened it, and gestured the inspector out into the night. The man collected himself to leave.

“Do you ever ask yourself, if this is a fit way for a man to make a living?” asked Tim.

“You can put that question to a magistrate, old feller. And he’ll tell you that it’s quite fit. Show me a society that does not need regulation.” The man was actually smiling broadly. “Consider this as a living act of affection from the government of New South Wales. People hate it when they are made an example of. But there has to be examples, now wouldn’t you agree?” He saluted by touching the brim of his hat. “I don’t object at all if you relate your experiences to the other storekeepers in town.”

And he sauntered off to the Commercial, having brought down the hugest and most exemplary debt upon the household of Shea.

“I bet you consulted the Lodge at the Good Templars on who to hit!” Tim muttered for his own comfort before closing up.

The teeth marks of authority were on him. How they stung! He was reminded by a familiar spurt of panic of the manner in which Constable Hanney had also shown power’s teeth in Kelty’s pub. You were left by Hanney and the man from the Colonial Secretary’s, both of them clanging on about civilisation and authority, with a fearful awareness of the crust-thinness of the civilised world.

Fifteen pounds just about cleaned him out. Spiritually as well as otherwise. And now without a spouse to tether him to living flesh and the named world, he knew he faced more visitations.

From his bedroom he could hear Ellen Burke leaving the sleeping children, creeping out the back to the privy and then back to an aggrieved bed. As long as she wasn’t dreaming of that little hawker. The idea that she might be doing so rankled with him.

Turn on his side. Turn towards the south-east and its mountains, away from the tricky town, away from the deadly ocean eastwards downriver.

Yet that didn’t save him. His marriage bed sat in the bright sea, and he trembled to see Kitty and Mrs. Arnold walking the deck staring over the gunwales. There was terrible Missy. In the sea, afloat Ophelia-wise, a bridal veil drifting out widely around her head. She paddled like a calm character. Like a child of Albert Rochester’s playing tranquilly in the Macleay at joining her father in his deep purgatory in West Kempsey cemetery.

“Can’t you make things go faster?” he cried out to Kitty. Pleading with his callous wife. For he wanted to leave Ophelia and Missy behind. Kitty nudged Mrs. Arnold, one woman nudging another in sisterly wisdom. Men have no patience. Wanting everything at once. If they bore children, they’d want to give birth within two days and God how they’d whinge about the endless wait!

So Kitty excluded him in front of her cabin-mate, old Mrs. Arnold. So Kitty ignored his fear. Like a judgment, Missy rose up on a rope ladder. When her head struck the over-vivid sky, there would be lightning. He began to yell in protest, and anger and terror woke him.

Oh Jesus. He got up and walked around trembling for a while. Despite the fifteen pounds, the smiling inspector so proud of the impact of good order on the storekeepers in the Macleay, Tim knew he must now clearly authorise another five-bob Mass. For the unnamed intention.