A River Town

Twelve

THE BUSINESS DAY would have started before anyone got from Crescent Head with fish and news, good, bad, nil. So put a saddle on Pee Dee and ride him to the dawn Mass. Imelda and the Waterford nuns and some of the boarders were there, praying for the lost child. On a plinth, the Angel Gabriel flourished a trident at the serpents and ministers of hell. Had Lucy taken a special note of his plaster wings? She wouldn’t have been tempted by them if Albert had lived, and taken her to the Primitive Methodists.

Imelda walked down the aisle towards him. He stood to meet the big nun. She leaned towards him and her breath smelled of communion wafers and almonds. She asked him if he had any hope.

“No,” he said. “The poor child fell into the total maelstrom.”

He felt nothing while telling her. No anger at all now. How curious. No anger against Lucy, Kitty, Mamie. No blame against Imelda pointing Lucy to Gabriel’s wings.

Imelda said, “I spent summers by the sea when I was a child.”

Tim tried to discern the child in that huge face.

“Are you familiar with Mullaghmore?”

“No, Mother.”

“I know enough to believe that we should perhaps reconcile ourselves to God’s will. I’ll convert the rest of her school fees to Masses to be said either for her safety or eternal rest.”

He would have welcomed even fifteen bob of that money heartily. But so profane to think like that.

“Yes,” he said. “For Lucy by name.”

“By name, yes,” she said. Putting her hand to his elbow briefly to ensure that he would stay upright.

“You see,” she said. “Remember the Angelus tower? She is a very hard child to predict.”

All right, he would have said, except that it would soil Lucy’s memory. You win that bloody argument!

As he moved out of the church, he was astonished and consoled to see Bandy in the rear row, kneeling very neatly. A formal Muslim in the house of the infidel.

Bandy the sole hero in all this. Innocent in all Mamie’s little dramas. He was the one who had taken the fishing boat to where Lucy had entered battling waves which hissed like acid. Bandy raised a tear-streaked seraphic face to him.

“Come outside,” Tim told him.

Out into the morning’s velvet, fraternal air. Bandy, Tim noticed, had not shaven. The features of the satiny upturned face seemed a little swollen with earnestness.

“Have you slept, Bandy?”

Bandy bowed his head. “I waited here. I didn’t wish to go anywhere else.”

“Here? Here?”

“I saw at once that I possessed no other home.”

“But your father’s home…?”

Bandy stared up at the top of the Angelus tower where Johnny and Lucy had shared their high hazy view. “I have to tell you, Mr. Shea, that I am the newest Christian of all—at least in my desire. I am a fallible creature with my sins written on my forehead. But I have felt God’s breath, and where it lists in the valley of the Macleay. It lists to the Christ rather than to the Prophet. Hearing the wind, I have decided not so much to turn myself around as to increase my store.”

“Oh God, Bandy. What are you saying? A change of faith? It won’t make any difference to the Turf Club.”

His gaze still on the apex of the tower, Bandy sighed. “No, Mr. Shea. Please don’t do me that injustice. I heard the wind, old chap. When I visited the priest’s house here to tell them of Lucy’s accident, the woman who maintains the house asked me to wait. And I waited, and in my waiting was confident of what I had been taught in childhood, that Jesus was a prophet but not the final one. The priest stayed inside, as if knowing that my mind could be turned. And as I stood there I felt a wind blowing from within the house, from the very centre of things. It pushed against my brow. All around, in Kemp Street, nothing happening. But here at the priest’s door a blast!”

Bandy burned with his story.

“Like you I am used to doorways, to waiting, to receiving the odour of the house and the currents a house contains. Often curious smells, Mr. Shea. Made up of God knows what. Bad secrets and failures here and there. But this door was so different, this house. A mighty breeze, Mr. Shea. Blasting away at me.”

“It’s a big, old, comfortless place,” explained Tim.

“No, no,” insisted Bandy, shaking off Tim’s blunt explanations. “More than that, old chap. As that wind washed over me, I knew at once that Jesus was more than prophet, was the living Son of God. It was so clear to me, Mr. Shea. Christ the Son of God. The man I was waiting to see might well be perhaps nothing more than a hawker like me. Except for this, this serious truth which had washed over my face and skin, bathed and baptised me. And I was ready and thirsty for it after the awful day we had suffered. Ready to be refreshed, Timothy, and made anew. I am not a servant of the valley. I am its citizen.”

“But you always have been.”

“Not quite,” said Bandy with a tired smile. “But now I felt that my blood was your blood, Mr. Shea, and that we were both brothers in redemption. I have become one with you, old chap. I am, to quote Father Bruggy, taking instruction in the faith.”

Bruggy. Consumptive Bruggy.

“What will your father say of this move?”

“It will be a sadness for my father. He will say this to me: You would not do it if they threatened to shoot you. So why do you do it for the sake of a breeze?”

“I think that’s a bloody good question, Bandy.”

“I pray with a fresh voice. A fresh voice which the Great Virgin has never heard before.”

The idea washed into Tim and gave him a sudden colour of hope. But it came to his tongue as irony and laughter. “At least they won’t be able to say you’re a Fenian, son. Fenians come a bit pinker than you.”

A sulphur-crested cockatoo, a big, robust bird, tore through the air at the corner of Tim’s sight. It arrested and shocked him with its brilliant white, its splendid yellow comb. It joined others of its species in a tall gum tree in the paddock across the road. A tree so adorned always looked as if its branches were hung with white and yellow silk.

There was something about this brightness this morning which caused Tim to sag and weep. Bandy was forced to hold him up.

“Tim, Tim,” said Bandy. “We must go to our daily work, though in grief and weariness.” He freed a hand and indicated the sky, the Angelus tower, the Celtic cross atop the church and the school. “We must be borne up and consoled by all this.”

Drinking tea at the dining room table, Mamie and Kitty looked wan.

“You went to Mass?” asked Mamie.

Considering her, he felt no enmity. No admiration either. Not for her vanity. But Lord, the hell had been shaken out of it!

“A lot of people were there,” said Tim. But he did not mention Bandy. With sleep and in time, Bandy might change his attitude.

“I must go,” said Mamie. “I must go too. I must go to the Rosary tonight.”

Become a nun while you’re at it and leave a space here for orphans.

“Will you excuse me,” he asked, forcing a little sociable smile. “I have a letter to write.”

Kitty looked so pale. “Don’t work too hard, Tim,” she sighed.

Johnny and Annie still slept. An hour to store-opening. He found the inkwell in the living room and the special paper and sat at the table with the formal lamp on it. Rarely lit, this one, painted glass. A shepherdess with a bodice. French. Visits by Old Burke might warrant lighting this special lamp.

He began to write a letter.

“To Whom It May Concern”

The whom, he knew very well, was Ernie. Ernie who had chosen to be aggrieved with him. Ernie who had wanted a ceremony and citizenry unspoiled by the Missy affair. But it was impossible that Ernie actually knew the girl. Unthinkable that the spouse of divine Winnie… Well not impossible, but unlikely. Missy simply a shire scandal so huge no one talked about it. They wished to cover it up with regiments, to diminish it to scale beside the proposed Central-to-East bridge.

When he re-read it the letter reeked to him of the willing, peasant cleverness which marred his family and made it so uneasy on earth. Yet he felt as well so guiltily consoled by finishing this testimony. Would Lucy forgive the small joy he felt in repairing this one wall? In re-making the little world out of a pond of ink when she had taken on the huge ocean?

He knew in his blood that she wasn’t coming back soon or late. She would lie punishingly far out beyond the surf. Not for days either. It would be decades he would need to wait and wait.

His affirmation and pledge sat now in an envelope in his breast pocket in readiness for an early call on Winnie and Ernie Malcolm.

To the dining room door beyond which Kitty and her sister sat, soberly drinking their tea and discussing in hushed voices. While staring at the door jamb, he stated his intentions. “I’ll be back in time for opening,” he said. He creaked out an oblique smile.

Kitty drew his gaze, and her frown and her clannishness now seemed beautiful to him. Small, deliciously indented lips. A network of sisters too. For what he’d ranted about at night now had a new light on it.

“It’s just business,” he told her.

He put Pee Dee in his traces. Pee Dee recovered from his comic spasm.

“Off to Winnie’s,” he told the horse. “It’s for her intercession.” Hail, Holy Queen, sister of Alfred Lord T… Wife to Ernie, the Buddha of the Macleay. If Ernie not in then on to his office. Had Missy ever seen something of Ernie? If so, how, when, where?

No, Ernie was a citizen, not a lover. It was simply this: Ernie did not want promising Kempsey burdened with Missy’s name.

A few morning people in the streets of mauve dust. They did not seem to be electrified by the news from Crescent Head. Two saw-millers walked down Belgrave Street carrying tucker bags, their children with them, running and returning. He hauled at Pee Dee’s reins a bit, secretly examining the men as they passed, and saw at once—or so he thought—that they would respond wistfully to the Rochester orphan. The only rage at her death came from him. “Sad, sad,” they would say. “Poor little thing…” The little doll-like tragedy would sit in the corner of their rooms for a week or so. Small-boned. Meagre. Fading.

And Mrs. Sutter to be visited and Hector to be consoled this endless day!

He turned Pee Dee out of Elbow and into River Street. At Ernie’s place he was slow in tethering Pee Dee, at last putting his forehead against the horse’s neck.

“Well, your tucker depends on this, old feller.”

Pee Dee took no account of this peculiarly human frailty. His air was that of someone who had an inheritance in another place.

Tim chose the side path and went to the back of the house. There was no activity about the cookhouse, he noticed. No smoke from the chimney, no fragrance of breakfast-kindling wood. Were the Malcolms not up?

He knocked at the opened back door but Primrose did not come. Straining his head around the jamb, he saw the curtained place where Primrose slept. She was there. In the bed. Because her breathing could be heard.

“Oh, the big feller,” she sang. “With the money purse.”

Staring into the depths of the house, he was startled to see immobile Winnie regarding him narrowly from the door of the dining room.

“Oh,” he said. “Mrs. Malcolm.”

“Is it you again?” she asked, in a tone which implied she did not seem to be sure who it was. A sad deterioration. She too was falling down some slope. She wore an evening jacket and a long loose muslin dress. Long, long strands of hair had come unbraided. In the crook of her right arm, she carried her black cat.

“I wondered was Ernie in?”

“Ernie’s gone all night. A contretemps. His favourite servant, mind you, has a fever.”

She nodded towards the curtained space.

“I’ll go and see him at his office then.”

“No need. Come in, come in for God’s sake. Whatever you wanted. Drawing room. Drawing room.”

“I can’t stay long,” said Tim.

He followed her along the hallway into a vast drawing room. Three settees, lamps, a roll top desk, a bookcase. A distant table, with china stacked on it. A flash dinner set gleaming there.

“My husband brought home a gift,” said Winnie, “and as so often happens it triggered disputation. Perhaps if you see him when you go on to visit him, you could tell him I need him to come home again?”

A certain moisture appeared in her eyes and she flushed. The cat remained strangely quiet in the crook of her arm.

“Yes, I’ll do that for you,” said Tim. “Perhaps something you could do for me. People think I write these letters, that I’m political. I wondered could you speak to Ernie for me? I swear I wrote no letters.”

“And you will speak for me, Tim? Is that the bargain? Tennyson speaks for Daley? Daley speaks for Tennyson? ‘So I triumphed ere my passion, sweeping thro’ me, left me dry, Left me with a palseyed heart and left me with a jaundiced eye.’ That’s what Tennyson says.”

“It’s a nice set of china, as far as I can tell from this distance,” said Tim, abashed, and unable to quote a thing in this contest of rhymes. “I’m sure Ernie will be home soon, but I’ll tell him if I’m lucky enough to see him.”

“Home they brought her warrior dead,” said Winnie on a streak of verse,

“It’ll be all right,” said Tim.

He wanted to be off. He wanted to find Ernie, who would probably be irritable after a night spent in the Commercial, or perhaps on the floor of his office. But he must be spoken to direct.

“I’ve taken a vow now, Tim,” said Winnie Malcolm. “No more verse. No more verse. This is Kempsey after all. And Ernie is Ernie. The china from David Jones is the limit of grand things.”

“Is that cat well?”

She closed her eyes and her mouth slackened.

“It seems sick.”

She laughed and squeezed her teary eyes up and seemed to squeeze the poor cat as well. Six months ago he’d thought her the most abstractly beautiful woman on earth.

“I’ll ask him not to ruin you, Tim. You ask him not to ruin me in return.”

“If you’ll ask him calmly, he must take notice of you.”

“A kind of notice,” she said, beginning to shudder. “A kind of notice. Do you know my cat’s name? Its name is Electra.”

It seemed an overly classical name for a Macleay mouser.

She shook her head. “Ernie calls it Kitty. So your fat little wife and your brats, Mr. Shea! You’re worried for them?”

“Extremely so, Mrs. Malcolm. I have given people good credit and am given little credit myself.”

“I must stand by you and thank you, Tim, for all the poetry. There is something you can do for me. Would you kindly post this letter? I am not well enough to go out and do it myself.”

She gave him a thick and odd-sized envelope. Something stiff had been wadded in it. He knew it was un-gallant to read the address, so maintaining custody of the eyes he put it into the side pocket of his coat, his breast pocket being already occupied by his solemn declaration.

“Have no concern,” he said. “It’ll be attended to today.”

“The letter not to be mentioned to Ernie, though.”

Oh God, she was making a conspirator of him. And if Ernie discovered this… Well!

“All right,” he admitted. “Everything is in confidence between you and me. If I post this letter, I never posted it. All right? Is that our understanding?”

She moved the seemingly sick cat into the crook of her left elbow and hauled Tim to herself without warning, kissing him wetly and lushly on the lips. This was an experience nothing like what he had once envisaged and—with one side of his nature—expected.

Before he could disengage himself, he heard behind him someone enter and commence gasping. The sound of outrage? Bloody Ernie! he surmised.

But battling Mrs. Malcolm away, he saw it was Primrose emerged from the corridor. Looking at him from broiled eyes. “Oh the white feller,” she announced. “Fire on his bloody head!”

“Dear God, Winnie,” said Tim. “She is very sick.”

Primrose slid to the floor and lay on her side, wheezing. Something landed up from another realm.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh dear Jesus. This is not plague, is it?”

“Don’t be a ninny, Shea. It is purely influenza.”

“Does Ernie know?”

“She had nothing more than a cough at teatime yesterday.”

The Argus and the Chronicle were unanimous in the matter of sudden onset.

“I must fetch Dr. Erson.”

“Oh, you arrange my affairs? Yet want me to speak for you!”

“Let me find a rug for Primrose.”

“Yes. Make free of my house, Mr. Shea. Go on. Do whatever you like.”

Out through a wide door and across the lobby, he found a bedroom but kept custody of his eyes as if he were being observed by Ernie and would need to justify himself. If it were simple influenza, what a fool he would be! People could rave from a mixture of influenza and laudanum. People could see fire about the heads of others.

When he came back with the rug from the base of the Malcolm bed, he was pleased to see Winnie Malcolm seated. She had lain the cat, purring and gagging by turns, on the ground.

“Look,” said Tim. “It is shedding.” There was a trail of black hairs where the thing writhed.

Winnie laughed awfully. She drew herself up in a theatrical posture. “Then you must do something, Shea! Men of action and decision. ‘Bury the Great Duke, With an Empire’s Lamentation!’ Holy God in Heaven, what a laughable crew!”

“Wait here, Winnie. Sit still till I fetch Erson.”

“How did you know Erson’s our physician?” asked Winnie.

“I’m a prophet, Mrs. Malcolm.”

She shook her head at this silly claim.

He chose to rush out by the corridor, the dining room, pantry, back verandah. Hustling through the side garden with its rose trellises, he inspected his shirt inside his coat, fearful of some sudden infestation. He did not have time for a proper survey. He removed Pee Dee’s feed bag, climbed aboard, took the brake off and screamed, “Yoa!” at the horse while desperately shaking the reins. Pee Dee broke out into a grudging canter.

“You are an utter uncooperative bastard!” Tim screamed at him.

The horse began to trot all at once. “Good fellow,” sang Tim. “Good fellow!”

The downhill slope helped. So, reaching Dr. Erson’s surgery. Leaving the horse and jogging in panic-stricken, Mrs. Malcolm’s mad spittle-ridden kiss sitting in his mouth. There were women and children waiting on chairs. He jiggled a little bell on a table in the centre of the room and Mrs. Erson came in from the hallway. He muttered a request to see the doctor on a pressing matter. She frowned but was unwilling to disturb her husband. Yet Tim did not want to utter the word in the room where people waited with daily twinges to see the doctor. How could plague safely be spoken? Later he would not be sure how he managed to speak and achieve these things. He remembered being taken to the surgery and telling Erson of the series of signs he’d had in Ernie’s house. And Erson frowning away, a cloud crossing his face. Tim was after all the man who’d ridden to the plague camp, the man too foolish to shoot an unruly horse. He should be the subject of reports from other people, you could see Erson thinking. He should not be reporting on others.

Even as he spoke, Tim was very taken with this question too—how would Ernie Malcolm let him off the hooks of credit and repute if he recklessly called doctors to the house? If Primrose had flu, the cat distemper, Winnie merely gin?

Tim thanked the doctor for hearing him out and said he would continue with the day’s work. There were many to be seen about yesterday’s tragedy.

“No,” said Erson. “Tim, listen, you must return to Malcolms’ for now.”

“I have a day’s work,” Tim protested. “And a letter to post.”

“No, I beg you, Tim. Go back to the Malcolms’ for the moment, until we see. I can’t imagine you’ll be kept long. But you are what is called a contact now.”

Tim flinched at this idea. That house in West on Showground Hill. It seemed a possible sepulchre to him.

“So go back there for now,” Erson said. “Just until we are sure. This is likely just a fever. But if it were not, you could kill your wife and children and other citizens with a mere visit.”

“I understand,” Tim insisted, flinching. Did Erson believe what others said and expect anarchy of him? “I am as reasonable as the next fellow.”

“I am pleased to hear that, since the police have extraordinary power in this matter.”

In all bloody matters. Yet how dismal he felt, how lost.

Erson began writing. Then offering Tim a note. “One thing you can do, Tim. I must go quam primum to the Malcolms’. But you could take this to Ernie. Don’t be tempted to stop on the way, and don’t stand too close to people. I trust you in this. If, as we hope, it’s nothing, you’ll be home by night.”

So Dr. Erson to the Malcolm house, Tim to Ernie’s office in Smith Street. By Clyde Street to avoid a sight of the store, to avoid being tempted to call to Kitty, or to be delayed by a palavering Offhand or Habash. Into Smith Street by the back route, far from the Post Office. He abandoned Pee Dee and the cart, ran up the stairs at the side of Ernie’s office block and so presented himself at a non-infective distance from the desk of flash, robust Miss Pollack of East, Ernie’s secretary. Perhaps Miss Pollack was the trouble between Ernie and Winnie.

A matter of great urgency, he told her. Bugger the mistrust on her face. “Dr. Erson wants to see Mr. Ernie Malcolm immediately at home.” Just watch her now abandon haughtiness for dismay.

She went inside, and then Ernie himself appeared in the door of his office, his brow lowered, lips pushed forward, ready to ward off Fenian ambushes and pleas.

“You needn’t put on any sort of face, Ernie,” Tim told him. “There’s sickness in your house.”

“Winnie?” he asked as if he already expected it and was half-pleased it had come.

“Primrose at the moment.”

“A sickness, Mr. Shea?”

“Erson’s gone up there to put a name to it. You and I have to go too.”

“You? Why so?”

“Here’s a note from Dr. Erson. I am what he calls a contact, Ernie. You would be too. Better not to argue but to go.”

Ernie read the page Erson had written and at once briskly fetched his coat and hat, as if he had no unfinished business at all. He did not speak to Miss Pollack as he left.

Tim and Ernie joined now in a mutual rush for the Showground Hill. Urging Pee Dee, Tim arrived in sight of Ernie, who had drawn up beside the doctor’s neat pony cart. Saying nothing at all in farewell to his horse, Tim walked freely through the central gate and so entered the house by the front door. He could see and hear Mrs. Malcolm sneezing hectically, jolting the dazed cat she cradled.

Tim and Ernie stood separate by the drawing room door and watched the kneeling Dr. Erson attend to Primrose. As the doctor raised his head, Tim saw with alarm that he wore a white linen mask and white gloves, and this highly serious combination was somehow more shocking than if it had been spotted in one of the town’s other two more sombre, less musical physicians.

“You must lay down that cat, Mrs. Malcolm,” Dr. Erson told Winnie through his mask. Tim thought he sounded a little dismayed, as if a sick cat and a fevered black woman were for the moment beyond his powers of containment.

“Tim, fetch me another cushion from the sofa,” he called. As Tim took the cushion and approached Primrose, Erson reached his arm for it in an exaggerated way.

“Thank you, Tim,” called cracked tragic Winnie, stifling another sneeze, and clumsily winking. A reference perhaps to the letter. “It’s just as well you’re here.”

It was fortunate therefore Erson had other tasks for Ernie, sent him off to call over the garden fence, asking his neighbour loudly to send his two boys, the Woodbury twins, for the police and the district ambulance. With the physician’s eyes tracking him, Tim followed Ernie as far as the back door, and watched from there. Contemplating whether to flee. And so carry plague to Kitty.

Tim returned to the living room. Erson got up from Primrose’s side, and murmured to him. “Cannot pretend it isn’t serious, Tim. No reason you should develop the disease though. You have not had close contact. Nothing to do other than wait out quarantine. Seven to perhaps ten days I fear.”

“Dear God,” Tim said. Seven days would ruin him. But he was appalled too that Winnie Malcolm had kissed him so moistly for so long. Did that make him a close contact? Closer than Ernie who perhaps hadn’t been kissed for some time? How would a man confess that sort of distinction to Erson?

Caught so deep in this poisonous house, he covered his mouth with his hand for a time. That could not however be kept up.

Ernie was waiting outside in the front garden now. Tim could see him pacing, pausing by bushes he seemed to find unfamiliar. Someone else’s garden. Winnie’s.

“Are you making any headway with Primrose, Dr. Erson?” said Winnie, her nose snuffling.

Erson looked at Tim. Primrose’s gasping, you would have thought, was evidence enough. “She is very ill,” he told Winnie. “We’ll leave her here on the floor for the moment. For her comfort.”

Winnie intoned:

“That’s Alfred Lord Tennyson, isn’t it?” asked Erson.

“My dearest mother died of an extreme fever,” said Winnie. “Far away, you know. Melbourne. Do you remember that? The typhus outbreak of the Eighties? You may have heard of it. Doctors told my father it was remarkable for striking down some of the better types of people.”

“I’ve read of it,” said Erson, frowning down at Primrose. But you knew straight away he hadn’t really read of it.

Winnie said, “My mother was out shopping with her maid in Melbourne when caught by one of those quite terrible summer storms which bring the temperature falling. The maid insisted on running into some hovel in the city and coming out with an aunt’s coat. My mother was grateful for it even though the garment wasn’t of the cleanest. We surmised it was then she suffered the fatal lice bite.”

Still nursing the cat, Winnie began to shed gentle tears, no frenzy in them. An orphan modestly requiring of God the causes of extreme events.

“The fatal bite,” she reflected. “You know, I didn’t like Primrose. Ernie’s choice. I wish her no harm but do not like her. Do you think God is mocking me now, Dr. Erson?”

She seemed at that moment just about ready to fall. Erson seized on this helplessness of hers. “Sit down now in that tall-backed chair, dear lady. That’s exactly right. I would like you to place that cat of yours on the floor at your feet.”

In both respects—to Tim’s surprise—she obeyed him. Erson rose and walked towards her then, making hushing sounds until her tears ceased. He did not approach too closely though. Looking down, he surveyed from his full height the cat and its patchy coat.

“Make her some tea, Tim,” asked the physician through his mask. “Could you do that?”

Tim moved to do it. Wishing to prove his promptness to the doctor who thought him suspect for visiting the plague camp and failing to send Pee Dee to the knackers. But before going, Tim stepped up close to the doctor. “I was hugged and much breathed on by Mrs. Malcolm,” he confided. “Not her fault of course—you see how she is.”

Erson shook his head. “God, Tim, you’re quite a lad,” he said softly.

Tim feared he’d betrayed Winnie somehow. “No, I was kissed when she was upset. I didn’t choose it, and she didn’t either in this awful distress. Something disordered in her, you see.”

Erson looked at Tim with something far too much like pleading. “Come with me then. I’ll have you gargle. It might be of some use.”

Leaving drowsing Winnie and Primrose, they went out the back and found the fire in the cookhouse was out. And so no tea. For who had the spare intent to get a fire going in the stove on such a morning. The doctor took what seemed to be carbolic from his bag and mixed some with cold water from the tank. Wrigglers in it just like the last water he’d drunk at the Malcolms’, but the carbolic made them frantic.

Erson watched Tim gargle and spit by the cookhouse door. He seemed still to be weighing Tim. To hell with that!

“I haven’t caused this, you know,” Tim told the doctor. “And I was kissed and held firmly. All against my will.”

But he remembered what some could describe as earlier desire, and his face burned.

Erson said, “I don’t so much want to be here, deciding on you one way or another. But you were the one who came to me. You could have gone to Dr. Casement or Dr. Gabriel, but came to me!”

“But now we need to be quarantined. Not you though?”

Erson’s eyes above the mask considered him in sorrow. That was worse than anger. “I will not go home again from the hospital until your quarantine period is done with. The other Macleay doctors will look after my normal patients. I will be on call for you alone. I shall need to be bathed and my clothes fumigated just as with you, Tim.”

Nothing to be said then. Nothing to be hoped for. Except Tim did say, “I didn’t understand. You’ll find me a good patient.”

They returned to the living room where Winnie drowsed and Primrose raved. Fragments of words came out. Or perhaps the other, half-remembered language.

Outside in the garden, Ernie had stopped pacing. Through the windows it could be seen that Hanney had arrived on a police mount. He was dressed not as Tim had seen him emerge from the Armidale Road an age past—not in cavalryman’s breeches, but in the usual dusty navy blue. Erson rushed across the room and lowered his mask with his white glove to call orders through an opened pane.

“Please, Ernie. Come inside now. Constable, don’t you come in but wait there.”

Hanney paused on the garden path and saw Tim behind Erson. Tim didn’t doubt he’d been spotted. It was clear in the slow triumph of the constable, the way he shook his head. Not surprised to see Shea his humiliator in the matter of plague camps. Now at the plague’s centre. He stepped a few paces closer, took his hat off and watched hard.

“That’s Shea the grocer in there?” he called. The presumption of guilt. Suspicion confirmed. And so on.

Erson cried, “Exactly,” before adjusting his mask. Hanney stared a little longer. Looking on Tim as familiar and instigator to all the tragedies—Albert, Missy, Lucy, and now perhaps, the worst of all.

“Thank you, constable,” cried Dr. Erson. “You could wait by the gate for the district ambulance!”

Meanwhile Ernie stepped listlessly up onto the verandah. The far-off river could be seen violet behind him. He paused on the verandah and came in then, opening and closing the door, and appeared in the living room. Self-imprisoned on his hearth.

Watching him now, Tim felt an enlarged sense of damnation, of the separation of Hanney’s normal dusty police blue from his own grey cloth coat.

All the unmade and unmakeable calls—Kitty, Mrs. Sutter, Hector, customers—in turn itching in him. Ernie called to his wife. “Are you feeling not too badly, dear?”

But Winnie did not answer, though you could hear her shifting in her chair. Dr. Erson had crossed the living room to approach the corner table. He picked up one of the china plates and inspected it.

“Winnie’s new set,” cried Ernie, and when Erson did nothing more than nod, Ernie turned to Tim. “What were you doing here anyhow? Drumming up business or pouring the bloody gin into a man’s wife?”

“I asked your wife to intercede for me. Tell you that I’d asked for nothing more than to be paid. Three months’ credit is enough, Ernie. And while we are bloody at it, I have written a statement I wanted to deliver to you.”

He took the letter pleading his innocence from his breast pocket. But remembered he was meant to keep his distance.

“I wish to give Ernie this letter,” Tim told Erson.

“Hold on to it for now,” murmured the doctor, putting one of the plates down.

Seven days’ quarantine. There would be time to talk to Ernie.

“So china, eh?” Dr. Erson asked.

“Yes,” said Ernie. “A present for my wife.”

“A peace offering,” murmured Mrs. Malcolm to herself. “A dove. An olive branch.”

“Just settle down, dear,” weary Ernie advised her.

“China,” said Dr. Erson. “From China by way of David Jones. And it came in a crate?”

“Yes. Very flash.”

“The ungrateful wife!” said Winnie Malcolm theatrically.

“I did find a deceased rat in the crate,” Ernie confessed. “Took it out and threw it to the back of the yard. However, found it bloody dragged back into the house by that cat. I took it finally and properly burned it.”

At the mention of the cat, Winnie Malcolm bent to pick the creature up again.

“No, Mrs. Malcolm,” Erson cried out.

“You can’t get plague from a cat, can you?” Ernie asked in a pathetic husbandly voice. “Your cat may be very ill, dear,” he explained to Winnie without waiting for Erson’s answer.

Dr. Erson’s grimness of movement. No longer that of the matinee actor. He took off gloves already perhaps sullied by contact with Primrose, and felt Winnie’s brow and the glands under her jaws, and then her underarms. After vanishing to wash his hands like a modern physician, he returned and repeated his medical exercises with Ernie and then Tim. Tim had had to try to read the doctor’s eyes as the other two victims were gauged and handled, but now he felt Erson’s masterly cool fingers probing at his armpits. They were somehow a sacrament of comfort.

Outside, beyond the gate, pulled by two draught horses and greeted by Constable Hanney, the Macleay’s white ambulance wagon turned up, putting a full stop to Tim’s attempt to make peace with Dr. Erson. Two men got down, tying white linen masks around their noses and mouths as they came towards the door, and dragging white gloves onto their hands. The world entire, it seemed now, knew that he and Primrose, Ernie and Winnie could not be safely touched. How astonishing an idea in a place like New South Wales, a modern colony, a land of promise.

Dr. Erson opened the door to the men, and they came in in official boots, ordinary men raised to authority by their masks. In their hands they carried a rolled-up stretcher. Failed farmers reduced to carrying out the mercies of the ambulance.

“Take the cat,” Dr. Erson murmured through his mask. “Wring its neck. Watch yourself. It may have plague fleas. Then the stretcher for the black woman. Wrap her up well.”

Tim shook his head. How did I manage to be here, at the end of the world, on a remote river, in a bushweek town on precisely the right morning to incur this risk?

Primrose protesting at their presence in her own language. The Gaelic of the Yarrahappini of the Macleay. One of the ambulance men wearing heavy gauntlet gloves now and lifting the cat from Winnie’s feet and gingerly holding it at most of his arm’s length.

“Poor cat, poor cat!” murmured Winnie. She stood up and made a noise of protest. Dr. Erson rushed to hold her back by the shoulders, and she begged to know, “Has the rot gone so far?”

“Kitty will follow,” called Ernie. As Winnie had predicted, he did not use the flasher Greek name Electra. “The cat will come behind.”

“Is the dumb universe spoiled too?” cried Winnie.

A fine question, Tim thought, deserving a better audience.

“No, be at ease, Mrs. Malcolm,” he cried.

One of the ambulance men, carrying a sealskin sack, proof against fleas, passed through the garden towards the wagon. Winnie thank Christ not alert enough to see that. The fellow hung the bag from a hook on the side of the wagon. Back in the house then to rejoin his mate.

As the two ruined farmers lifted the black woman from the ground, Ernie stepped forward overtaken by sudden anguish. “I have a very important meeting to attend tonight,” he told Erson.

Above the linen mask, Dr. Erson looked at him. “Ernie, this is grievous indeed. There are no meetings for us at the moment. Your associates would not thank you for coming amongst them, and will postpone the meeting anyhow on the advice of the sanitation officer.”

“And we are most endangered?” Ernie asked.

“You are most endangered, sad to say, Ernie.”

“Bloody hell then,” said Ernie, looked at Tim, and laughed.

Winnie paid more attention than he did as her un-liked servant was borne away.

The ambulance waiting, Ernie packed a bag of clothing each for himself and Winnie. From the living room he could be heard sighing as he chose items. Packing not for some brave voyage on Burrawong but for a meaner one in the white wagon.

Each item would need to be fumigated at the hospital, said Dr. Erson, so certain as to what would be done. There must have been secret meetings between the physicians and sanitation officer to plan how these affairs would be managed. From the hallway he encouraged Ernie and Winnie, who had now joined her husband in the packing. Ernie’s muttered directions and Winnie’s sudden raised voice marked the work of sorting garment from garment. In the dreary air, Tim stood by astounded and dismal.

When the Malcolms were ready and had emerged from their room, Tim moved to pick up Winnie’s bag, but the two men in masks were back. One of them offered to carry it at the rear of the promenade out of the house. As they all gathered themselves to leave, neither Winnie nor Ernie seemed to look back. Winnie won’t be returning, Tim thought. She will go back to her Melbourne.

Here now on the garden path, the procession still in good order. Erson at the head, the man who knew their chances best, and Winnie, hair unbrushed, assisted—contrary to the rules of keeping distance—by Ernie, who toted his own portmanteau.

From far up the fence, Hanney watched. Safe from exhalations or fleas or whatever it was which made up the curse. In lazy delight he waved a hand at Tim. No chance he would lose this bit of the contest. If plague were in Tim, then Hanney would consider it an utter and personal victory, a knock-out punch, a besting. Tim Shea clean bowled—Hanney!

The man not burdened with Winnie’s port swung open the back door of the ambulance, then stepped down to allow the rest of the party to mount, the doctor first. In the soft brown light of the interior, Primrose had been lain on a broad bench far forward.

Dr. Erson directed the seating. The Malcolms on a bench running down one side of the wagon—“You and Winnie should really sit apart as hard as that might be.” He pointed Tim to the bench on the other side, a position near the door.

This was the side where Primrose lay, but at a more than safe distance forward. Tim squinted up the length of the wagon to where she had been lodged on her stretcher and thought that in this umber air Primrose looked uneven in colour. Still she murmured, engaged in some horrid argument.

Erson stepped out to travel in the front with the ambulance fellows, and Tim sat last of all and the door was closed. Winnie and Ernie opposite him, lit through the canvas-covered windows. Against the rules, Ernie reached for and held Winnie’s hand at what would in normal times be thought a comic distance. Tim’s finest, imperious customers. The spacious couple who had descended the gangplank of Terara on picnic day.

The door now bolted from outside. Erson could be heard instructing Constable Hanney on returning Pee Dee and the cart to T. Shea—General Store.

“Tell the Shea woman not to be concerned,” Tim heard Erson tell Hanney. How could this constable be depended on not to twist the news in some way?

“Don’t play with the message, Hanney!” Tim called, but the warning sounded weirdly muffled in here.

“Why would I have to, Tim?” Hanney cried.

Outside. In no way a contact. Lucky bugger.

Behind the huge bungalow which was the Macleay District Hospital lay a barracks-like wooden building which had been the first hospital. People knew it as the loony house, since it was fitted out as a place to hold those lonely spirits who went mad up and down the river and needed to await shipment to the asylums of Sydney. Therefore it was set up with heavy wooden doors layered with steel, and barred windows.

Now it would be the Macleay’s quarantine.

The nurse to whom Tim had once delivered the body of Albert Rochester waited in the opened doorway of this isolation ward. Though she wore a mask, he could tell her by her forehead and eyes. At the top of the stairs, she stood aside as the ambulance men carried Primrose in. Then she addressed the rest of the party. Inside, she asked, could they kindly undress and put on gowns provided. Masks of white cotton would be found in the small dispensary and were to be worn whenever possible within ten feet of other patients. Future health depended on that. After close contacts with other patients, the masks were to be dropped in a bucket she would point out and new ones could be taken from the dispensary. In between, hands were to be strictly washed with carbolic soap. The clothing they were wearing at the moment would be fumigated—that was the best policy—and they would be supplied with clothing from their suitcases once that too had been fumigated.

She came down the stairs and took Winnie’s arm. “Is that her portmanteau?” she asked the man carrying Mrs. Malcolm’s bag. She did not wait for an answer but led Winnie up the steps. “You have a fever, dear,” she said. “Possibly just a cold.”

“Have you seen my cat, miss?” Winnie asked.

“I think the fellows are looking after it.”

Dr. Erson himself led the men upstairs, past the door lined with metal. Its flakes of paint and indentations made Tim’s soul creak with melancholy. He could taste despair brownly on his tongue. Into a comfortless yellow corridor of tongue-and-groove timber. Erson addressed Ernie and Tim. “That is your bathroom there. Are you aware of Sister Raymond? She is a brave young woman who has volunteered to attend to plague cases.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “At least take my receipt and cash books from my top pocket. My wife will need them.” He thought too of his letters. Winnie’s un-posted one as well.

Ahead, Sister Raymond said through her mask, “Of course, of course. All that.”

Dr. Erson said, “Place them by the door, Tim. We shall fumigate them and get them to your wife.”

Tim doubled back and laid the books by the door. Love letters to Kitty in a sense. But not enough joy in them.

Past three other doors down the corridor, a large whitewashed ward waited for him and Ernie to share. Camp beds set out. Two barred windows and the camp beds strictly separate and adorned with a scaffolding for mosquito nets. No nets were in place however, since mosquitoes were rarely found on top of this hill. All boards scrubbed. A place designed for perishing.

Everyone who wore a mask very busy now. Erson and the nurse discussing near the kitchen: refining their minds on the whole regulation of these perhaps-sufferers of bubonic. From the door of the large ward, Tim heard the two masked men clattering about, sloshing tubs of water into baths somewhere closer to the door, toting other heavy things elsewhere.

Then, Tim saw, they exited through the iron-girt door and brought back commodes. Thunder-boxes, shafts and handles affixed either side for carrying night soil away. They put such a contraption in a pantry across from the kitchen, for use by Ernie and Tim. What a divine punishment for political opponents: to have to share a shouse seat and smell each other’s water.

A second thunder machine. Located far down the corridor for use by the women.

In the men’s bathroom two tubs of steaming water waited, reeking of carbolic. Tim could smell the fragrance. One of the men came to the door of the ward and told him and Ernie to undress and lay out by the door the contents of their pockets, and any books and newspapers they had with them. Imagine, the letter returned to Winnie.

If it were a plaguey letter, the damage had already been done. He had already held it in his hands. Instead of putting it out, as he did all his other effects, including a wallet and the black Rosary his mother Anne had given him for his emigration, he slipped Winnie’s letter under his mattress.

Going to the bathroom, he was instructed to dip himself into one of the carbolic baths. Watched by the ambulance men, Tim unclothed, looking down at the auburn hair of his chest and legs and wondering why the failed and masked dairy farmers didn’t laugh.

Taking off his shirt across the bathroom—more than ten feet, Tim was pleased to see—Ernie revealed himself a chunk of a man. Certainly an ale-y belly, but grafted onto a body built for labour. Four square like the Army at Waterloo, hurrah! Gingery hair marked his heart and his prick and connected the two. So this is the boy Winnie had taken into her garden.

He wondered was he already fevered? All this Tennyson he’d read for Winnie’s sake washing up casually in his brain now.

Scalding in the tub, and something in the water burning at his skin. As long as the plague was scoured out by these means!

Opposite him, Ernie plunged his body into the tub with a sigh. Across the hallway in the women’s bathroom, Sister Raymond could be heard advising Winnie towards the hot water and soap.

“Take the bath, darling,” Ernie called musically from his own tub of water. “It’s for your good.”

He turned a tormented face to Tim and whispered, “She’s been hugging that bloody, flea-bitten cat half the night. Thank Christ though she always kept her distance from Primrose.”

Seen through the partially opened bathroom door, the ambulance fellows had begun working in the corridor, piling clothing into a wicker tub, Primrose’s night dress, Mrs. Malcolm’s chemise, his own shirt and drawers all tumbled in there promiscuously with Ernie’s tie and butterfly collar. The collected wealth of those infested.

“He left her nothing but a failed business,” people would say wisely as they watched poor little Kitty.

From the women’s bathroom, they could hear Sister Raymond saying, “Let me inspect you there, dear, to look for broken skin.”

Tim rose too, covering his privates with a freckled hand. Then to one of the white wraps which hung on the wall. He folded himself into it. His long feet stared bluely up at him. Flippers fit for a slab, he thought.

“Ernie,” he asked, “will your friends still blacklist me if I get the plague?”

Ernie shook his head and rose up urgently from his bathwater, his stub of a prick showing. Slug and angel of mercy.

“Poor Winnie,” Ernie said, his arse to Tim now as he gathered himself into a wrap. “What you call my friends… various of the Patriotic Fund gentlemen… I can’t undo the sort of work they’ve done on people already. As soon as you were suspected, Tim, they started writing off letters to the Sydney suppliers. You know, warning them your credit isn’t good. Your social credit as much as anything.”

Tim was struck still in his white shroud. Come on, Ernie! Was that possible? Something relayed so offhandedly. The ordinary power to ruin a man. On his big feet, Tim could say nothing. His tongue an orb of leather. You couldn’t pick the poisoned world apart with such a silly instrument.

“Your little store has a pretty hard row to hoe now,” Ernie stated. “I don’t approve of that sort of thing, Tim. A little campaign, without warning a man. Easy to get going though, don’t you see? But more so if a fellow is a bit behind on his payments and a bit strained for the ready.”

This knowledge couldn’t be contained. He knew that in this garment you could not exercise a rage properly, but that itself fed the rage. He rushed white-robed Ernie and pushed him up against the grooves of the wall.

“In that case, Ernie, God damn you! You’ve as good as murdered me, your whole murdering bunch!”

Ernie however wouldn’t give Tim the joy Tim wanted from him, the rage he could have punished. Wouldn’t even try. Ernie’s eyes slid sideways. He seemed too melancholy to be hit.

“Come, Tim. You’re not a solid sort, you’ve got to admit. Though I suppose the flea bites us both with equal venom. I could have forgiven even the dunning of Winnie.”

Tim stopped pushing so hard. You couldn’t push against such a pale talker.

“But those Australis letters, Tim. Baylor picked them at once. Boils down to this. A man who renounces his own society… who lies there at its heart pretending to patriotism… what can that fellow bloody well expect, Tim? What could you bloody well expect?”

Anger revived and Tim pushed Ernie back in place after all. “But I am not the sodding man.”

“Whatever you say, Tim. Everyone knows. It would have gone better for you had you appended your bloody name in the first place. Had the courage to do that… By the way, Tim, we are meant to be wearing masks aren’t we? Up this close.”

Tim let Ernie go and walked across the room. Just as well too, he decided then. Before Erson took any further false notion of him. “I suppose that was part of the bloody plan also then? That bloody inspector.”

“People like Billy Thurmond are very energetic. They meet like-minded visitors to the Good Templars and guide them to the people they would like to see punished.”

Ernie sighed, and Tim knew it was not just because the plague had him hostage. But on top of that he had changed in a month. At all recent encounters, there’d been no real enthusiasm in Ernie. No fuming rage even when he pretended there was. No hectic affection. Take the bath, darling. It’s for your good.

All his enthusiasm had been spent in writing that glowing letter about Hanney.

Not waiting for any further Ernie clarifications, Tim opened the door of the bathroom. It was—based on Ernie’s recent information—an even more venomous world, and what he saw now stood as evidence. Under Sister Raymond’s directions Winnie, barefoot in a white gown, staggered down the corridor.

“He said, ‘She has a lovely face,’” Tim remembered.

“‘God in his mercy lend her grace,

“‘The Lady of Shalott.’”

Mrs. Winnie Malcolm guided to a room further along than Primrose’s, and casually declaring, “I have a dreadful headache.”

“Oh, yes,” called Ernie soothingly over Tim’s shoulder. “But it may be from what you’ve taken.”

Winnie said nothing in rebuttal.

Ernie and Tim then were to share the third, big space. The men’s ward, for companionable madmen. Ernie sitting on his camp bed, his naked knees showing through the shroud-like cloth.

Soon one of the men in white brought in Tim’s fumigated effects and put them on a chair—watch, the letter offering the Patriotic Fund an affidavit, the blackthorn rosary beads his mother had given him when his trunk was packed and waiting for the charabanc to come for it and him. Oh migration, oh!

Carried habitually, these beads. Not honoured by as much use as his present fix would seem to warrant.

A negligible little pile of possessions was brought in and put on the chair near Ernie’s bed. Tim touched the big rosary beads above his cot. No need to be guarded about any of that any more. Murder revived in his heart with the sight of the beads. He imagined himself mad and purple with plague riding naked to Pola Creek and breathing on Billy Thurmond’s family.

The as-yet-unworn mask someone had placed on the deal chair by his bed depressed him, but he was cheered when a portmanteau packed by Kitty was delivered late in the day. Tim opened it gratefully and began to dress, a man reassuming his skin. Nothing smelled of fumigation—these came from Kitty’s uninfected household. A modest joy in that fact. His better pants and coat. Under-drawers and a singlet which smelled of sun and soap. Small aspects of her care—folded against the singlet for wearing around the neck a scapular, two patches of brown cloth connected by cord. A note in her hand said: “We all cry for you, Timmy. But soon soon I don’t doubt it! Saint Anthony’s scapula guards against plage and influenza.” Every Kenna family misspelling delicious to him. Then today’s Argus, Saturday’s unfinished Chronicle. So touching. Kitty knew he liked newspapers.

Added to the note, “Poor child still not found so must commit her to mercy, Tim.”

Across the room Ernie sighed and rose. His mask was in his hand. He seemed embarrassed by it. “You have reading matter, Shea. Perhaps when you’re finished with them… I wonder has the singing doctor seen fit to fumigate them. For now, I must visit poor old Winnie, as unwelcome as a man might be.”

Still in his white garment and on his white little blocks of feet, he went off to keep his marital post. He was on safe ground. For the nurse wouldn’t let him stand too close to his wife.

In the Chronicle, as Kitty had foreshadowed, news of no news of Lucy. Tim was now guilty to realise that in this pressing hour he had half-forgotten her. “Crescent Head fisherman Mr. Eric Dick says that the drowned child, who fell from Crescent Head’s Big Nobby during a picnic on Sunday, should by now have been found in the vicinity, unless caught by the stronger Pacific coastal current…” How Lucy would have embraced that stronger current! Sought its hand and let it make her a journeyer. While I am justly made to serve the plague’s time.

Page eight, the third Australis letter.

“Oh, Holy Christ,” Tim whispered. Reasonable citizens! In a town where people wrote off to the supply houses in Sydney, saying you were done for. Reasonable bloody citizens!

Masked Ernie wandered in again, glum, and slumped down on his cot.

“Not allowed close to her. She has a cold and looks a little flushed. Primrose, though, not well at all. The glands show black under her chin.”

Poor Primrose then. Winnie wouldn’t weep for her, and Ernie wasn’t likely to.

Tim knew Winnie’s letter lay beneath his mattress, but he had his useless statement of innocence beside his bed. No use giving it to Ernie now. Ernie was out of the debate. Perhaps use the back of the sheet to write to Kitty. As soon as he felt the first fever. Not till then would he know what to say.

A restless grief for Lucy had grown in him again. He tried to contain and soothe it with print. He shook out his Argus—Ernie could bloody whistle for the Chronicle, though reading the Off-hand might improve his mental habits. Tim leafed past the serials full of genteel fairness and simple maps of the world. He began to read how New South Wales had defeated South Australia outright in the Sheffield Shield cricket in Adelaide. Where, reports said, plague had also made its landing.

At mid-afternoon, when the isolation ward was quiet and masked Ernie across the room and Winnie Malcolm further down the hallway seemed to be asleep, he decided to pick up his own white mask, tying it at the back, all like a well-ordered patient, and went down the corridor to the door of Primrose’s room. Sister Raymond, however, intercepted him at the door, forbidding him with her huge eyes.

“I wanted to see what it was like,” Tim explained. “The poor woman… she’s had no company.”

“She’s not aware of that, Mr. Shea. The struggle is extreme.”

Patches of supremely black skin now in Primrose’s half-black face. What townsperson, very aged these days, maybe under the sod, had taken his lust up the river to Primrose’s black mother. A quart bottle of port handed over as the contractual grounds for Primrose’s mixed blood. She had white relatives in town who did not know of her. Didn’t know that their blood went to make the plague’s first target.

An awful struggle for Primrose. Her chin stretched up above a mumpy neck. Sister Raymond put a wet cloth on her forehead, dribbled some water across her mouth.

“It feels so normal, all this, don’t you agree?” he asked. “So usual?”

Albert Rochester normal across Pee Dee’s shoulders with a bag over his head.

In the humidity of mid-afternoon the thunderstorm, still standard in this late summer, struck the hospital hill. Three o’clock. Beneath the thunder Tim, gone to Primrose’s door again, witnessed the last weak seizures. In spite of nature’s bombast and the fury of rain on the roof, there was no sense of a great culminating tragedy. Tim in fact felt he was there yet not there, witnessing from another place. In the spiritless moment, in the ward wilfully empty of human decoration, fitful pieces of old prayers and funeral verses spilled over his lips but reached no proper conclusion. And yet while distant, still too real, too actual.

Behind the cold glass of his own fear he saw something to be admired. Sister Raymond stood up to make a healthy distance though not ten feet between herself and the half-caste and took off her mask so that Primrose could pass with the sight of a human face. He knew at once he had never given Lucy such a thing. He’d given her an anxious face, a dutiful, solicitous, guilty face. But nothing as frank as this.

The struggles ended as simply as you could wish. Primrose exemplary and quick at the end.

Her recent employers the Malcolms slumbered. Their suitcases of fumigated clothes lay by now at the foot of their beds so that like Tim they could dress as usual inhabitants when they woke.

But they still slept as the two men came down the corridor past Tim and lifted Primrose up and out without ceremony and straight away.

“Make way, Tim,” said Sister Raymond.

“Call the Malcolms,” he suggested.

“No. Not now.”

“You won’t burn her?” Tim found himself softly pleading as the ambulance fellows carried Primrose fairly delicately to the door.

“Doctor will see her,” said the nurse.

“Where will she go?”

“Consecrated ground, Tim.”

“Where? Where consecrated?”

He might in fact need to share her space with her, Primrose, Ernie, Winnie, Shea. Somewhere, haphazardly and uncritically, he and Primrose might be free with each other’s limbs.

Sister Raymond’s huge eyes over the restored mask, brown with some selfless, calm, sisterly virtue. “You do want to know things, Mr. Shea. In consecrated ground. The edge of West Kempsey cemetery.”

“A common pit?”

“Tim!” the sister warned him. But in times of epidemic, he knew, it was a matter of common pits, not individual resting places. Common pits and quicklime. The rumour of Primrose’s girlhood, let alone all the uncelebrated dinners and ironing she had done for the Malcolms, would be resigned to the fast work of that pit.

For superstition’s rather than medicine’s sake, mask off now, thrown into a bucket of carbolic and water. Hands washed in carbolic. New mask fetched for coming use from the pile in the small room named the dispensary. No need yet to put it on. No close contact planned. But performing these small duties very comforting.

Back in the ward where Ernie slept, he took down the thorn beads and applied himself to reciting one of the Sorrowful Mysteries. Jesus Is Crowned with Thorns. Hands trembling, beads likely to fall. Under his whispers, Primrose and her handlers crossed the garden outside and vanished past the window. Out to sea with Lucy and the narwhals.

He would choose that, though. To voyage with lucky Lucy. Rather than be with Primrose.

Later, while he read, Sister Raymond could be heard arguing soothingly down the corridor with an awakened Mrs. Malcolm. Winnie crying, “But I must see her!”

For something to say, Sister Raymond advised Winnie to wait for Doctor who would be here soon. Across the room Ernie writhed in his shallow afternoon slumber. Sister Raymond came in holding up a hand to signify that Tim should sit still.

“Mr. Malcolm, Mr. Malcolm,” said Sister Raymond. Ernie sat up in his white gown.

“I regret to tell you that your wife has a fever.”

“Oh dear God!” said Ernie. “She isn’t ready for this.” He sat up. “We have a reconciliation still to make…”

“Come and see her. I have dressed her in one of her own nightgowns.”

Ernie reached for his pile of fumigated clothes, but then covered his face with his hands and was defeated by the prospect of dressing.

“I’ll manage it soon,” he promised.

“Yes, but be quick.”

The accountant gathered himself and picked up a limp, fumigated white shirt with a high collar, rushed into his brown pants without bothering with drawers, and hauled on a pair of oxfords without socks.

“Dear, sweet God,” he murmured softly, catching Tim’s eye. “It’s all too quick by half, Tim. Where’s the bloody time for a resolution?”

Then he sat on his cot again.

“Could be just a simple fever,” Tim kept saying. How could you believe bloody Ernie would have looked so affecting? Recklessly shaking his square head. Tears spilling from his eyes.

“I have put a fresh mask there for you to wear when you’re ready, Mr. Malcolm,” Sister Raymond told him.

“Dear God, these masks,” said Ernie. “We are punished, we are punished.”

Tim stood as if to help Ernie by example, and Ernie painfully stood but then got going quickly towards the door.

“Wait for me,” the nurse called. In big masterful shoes she pursued him.

Winnie’s letter was certainly infested, then. He’d leave it where it was pending events. On his own, Tim spent a little time regarding Ernie’s watch-chain, which had flopped on the floor. With its array of civic medallions, scarlet, blue, gold, green, white, it resembled a brilliant snake. Ernie’s public skin sloughed off there while the poor bugger went in sockless pain to see his wife.

“Fatherless children,” he murmured aloud.

Annie uselessly earnest once she was fatherless, and turning suspicious. Johnny rushing down the precipices of the new century with every Lucy Rochester he could find. Seven-months-pregnant wife. Left with a barren store, a store from which the credit had run out. Kitty would fight, of course, but the idea of her undertaking this struggle seemed to him poignant beyond bearing. Old Burke might be sparingly kind, in a cold, cautionary way, saying what a fool her husband had been. Joey O’Neill would be more generous in spirit, he and Mamie supporting the children. But they’d all become a bread-and-dripping clan. No roast potatoes or leg of lamb or sago and custard as he and Kitty had grown accustomed to. O’Neill wasn’t fashioned for wealth.

Winnie not designed either for this silly plague, this paltry, plain affair in the old prison of Macleay lunatics. She was devised by temperament and by her lean and elegant bones to invite Death wistfully, to intend it. Not to be jumped on, nor ambushed like this.

Young Keats the poet who melted like snow. Winnie entitled to do the very same. Her poets had promised her that. Bloody Alfred Lord had promised it.

“Death closes all: But something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods…” Bullshit.

I should expose the bloody poets, Tim promised himself. That’s the letter I’ll write to the Chronicle! For Ernie’s sake, but for Winnie’s above all. For she’d believed them. Believed the posturers, the death-flirtatious buggers, and here she was in a plague ward amongst gum trees.

He took a decision to get up and follow the direction Ernie had taken. No mask on, since with Sister Raymond on duty no closeness could be hoped for. Following the corridor he reached a point from which he could see into Winnie Malcolm’s room. Nothing there that was up to the high level of Tennyson. The plainness of it all brought that instant sting of grief. Winnie very flushed, her face unencumbered and open, since she was beyond protecting… Seeing Ernie, and pushing at him with her fists. Ernie stepping back, uttering through the linen gag he wore un-poetical, forlorn sobs, moist in the wrong way for grandeur. But truly mourning also, poor fellow. Not the sort of sound normal to a mongrel pillar of the bush.

Sister Raymond soothed mewling Winnie with a wet cloth, holding her by the shoulder and persuading her to drink the second half of a cup of something—bromide, laudanum, God knows what. Something Lethean, Tim hoped. To make her serene. How could Ernie, whose duty was to love her, restrain himself at such a time?

“Now sit down by the door, Mr. Malcolm, if you don’t mind,” said the nurse, forcing the dose over Winnie’s lips.

Splendid Winnie Malcolm grew quieter—weakness and the drug curtailed the low drama, loosened her face, made it serene. On his chair, Ernie raked the backs of his hands with his nails and said at last so much, so many appeals to God and mercy, that Sister Raymond looked at him with something less than patience.

“Now we must be calm. Do you want us to have to bring more and more nurses?”

“No, no,” Ernie agreed. “But it’s too bloody cruel.”

“And it must be borne,” said Sister Raymond.

“I’m not afraid of bearing things,” Ernie claimed like a child on the edge of some darkness.s

All the thwarting of Tim’s letter to the Commissioner, all the betrayal over accounts and all the useless urgings to loyalty and valour meant nothing now to Tim. At this hour, Ernie presented himself as a plain animal in grief.

And this large young woman who commanded them. Be thankful at least for her. She would not permit florid deaths. They were under a duty, he and Ernie, to grieve and be fearful in an orderly manner. Theatre on their parts would only drag in more nurses or masked attendants and spread the peril too broadly.

In the early dusk, as Tim sat on his cot in the men’s ward, one of the white-coated men went by unmasked in the garden. Idly moving amongst the rhododendrons. Sun-leathered, about Tim’s age. Tim swore he’d never become such a man if lucky enough to live on. He’d get work hauling, cutting or milking rather than this. The fellow looked aimless, glancing up at the highest branches of a red gum. No doubt he and his mate paid a margin for plague duty, for waiting in their hut in the garden and carrying food and medicine back and forth, carrying the thunder-boxes. Carrying Primrose. But what margin would be worth it? And were they scared too? They certainly maintained a distance and didn’t swap their names with him and Ernie. Men with a memory of labour so fierce that they’d rather now be paid to hang around for the plague’s pleasure.

Soon after this sighting, he heard both attendants came along the path to the armoured door. They talked as they advanced. “Lost half the bloody herd,” Tim heard one of them say. Unlocking the barracks, they came in carrying trays of corned beef, potatoes, split peas, sago pudding. Their gloves, brilliant white, looked delicate on their big hands. Tim watched from his doorway as they put the four meals down on the table in the little kitchen by the door, and one of them went to get the teapot while the other began to trim and light the hurricane lamps. This lamplighter saw Tim approaching, held up a hand to keep him at a safe distance, and asked, “Feeling all right at this stage, Tim?”

“Thanks. It’s a bugger but I’m perfectly well so far.”

“Saw you walloping the cricket ball at Toorooka. Bloody good innings.”

“Ah yes,” said Tim gratefully. “My son’s a great chucker of the ball, did you notice?”

The lamp-trimmer nodded in his mask. “Fires upriver did for me. Lost half the bloody herd.”

But still no offer of his name. The other one went out again and came back with the teapot. Then both men left, locking the door. “Dinner,” Tim called as melodiously as he could down the corridor. Past the closed door beyond which Primrose had perished.

Entering the kitchen with Ernie, Sister Raymond took off her mask and then Ernie’s, stripped off her gloves, threw everything into the bucket of carbolic and water. She washed her hands with the prescribed carbolic soap—Tim watched all this, this antiseptic rite—and ate her meal quickly, standing at the kitchen bench, her back to Tim and Ernie.

“The corned beef will make us thirsty,” Ernie plaintively announced at the end of the table. He ate little before fetching a fresh mask without having to be told to, and returning to his station on the chair in the room along the corridor. Tim and Ernie plague-trained in less than a day by this rigorous nurse.

“Don’t go up close though,” Sister Raymond called after the accountant.

Not feeling entitled to crowd in on Ernie and Winnie, Tim loitered on his side in the male ward. The men could be heard coming in to take away the remnants for burning or burial. Tim could hear them chinking the plain china together as they exited.

He wondered were there sick half-castes and spiritual women in Grafton, Lismore, Bellingen, Taree? Or was the plague particular to this valley and to Sydney? If the latter, were they writing him up as a “contact” in the Sydney Morning Herald?

How sweet if released from here to make himself in a new town, taking definite account that everywhere there were Billy Thurmonds, M. M. Chances, Ernie Malcolms to be courted and reassured. Everywhere Lucy Rochesters looking for the sea or lost parents. He must give them a place at table too, no matter what Kitty told him about new-arriving Kennas. But within those limits, re-making yourself. Talk to Old Burke about a loan for a pub. Then, be a harder man! Meagher the publican had learned to be hard. Not to return cash to drunkards’ wives.

In darkness the new visitor was rapping on the door of the plague barracks, and then opened it with his key. Dr. Erson. Erson went by down the corridor in his fresh houndstooth suit.

The doctor could soon be heard discussing Winnie’s vital signs with demented Ernie. Tim waited. Winnie, Winnie. Erson came back past Tim’s door on his way to the dispensary. Some energetic washing went on there, hands were flapped about in the carbolic. When he walked in again to visit Tim, he looked perhaps tired. Perhaps fearful. He had his gloves off to feel the pulse in Tim’s wrist and placed the back of his hand against Tim’s forehead, but then put them on again to feel the glands under the chin and the arms and in the groin. He asked about joint pains and fever.

“Be kind to our friend Malcolm,” he murmured then to Tim. “We have hope for his wife, but…” The doctor looked steadily at him now. “The bubonic plague in the Macleay. Not possible says my every instinct. We must insist shipments to the Macleay are all unpacked and directly fumigated. That’s the only way. Perhaps you could mention that should people like Offhand ask you.” The doctor sighed to indicate the beginning of reflectiveness. “The plague returns at the end of a startling century and in a new location. To remind us that even here we are dust.”

“Winnie Malcolm was my most esteemed customer,” said Tim.

“The joy went out of her though at some stage.”

“This is nothing to do with joy,” the doctor reminded him.

“This is a matter of minute organisms entering the blood.”

Finished his inspection, Erson said, “I have every hope you might come out of here on your own legs, Tim.”

But he sounded too much like a punter assessing odds.

“Have you heard? Has the girl been found yet at Crescent Head?”

But Tim knew it was her nature to be lost for good.

“No word on that, Tim. But let me tell you, you have room in your head to deal with only one problem. Plague. So with the rest of us.”

Tim must write a letter for his parents. In the event and when the first fever comes and after the one to Kitty. What would they think of New South Wales if they heard of his death from plague here in the Macleay? They would think barbarous, Asian place. They would consider him an unfortunate exile. They would never know how he loved all this, the mad antipodean river.

“You are having a hard year,” said Erson.

Under the doctor’s loving yet mistrusting gaze, Tim said nothing. Too complicated a remark to answer.

Finished with him, Erson stood up and took on the air of a tired, ordinary man leaving to take his day’s dinner, looking for the oblivion of his bed.

Ernie asleep still. Only his shoes off, waiting by his bed for the night walk to Winnie. Sister Raymond had placed fresh white gloves and a fresh mask on Ernie’s camp bed. Tools for making his farewells.

Sister Raymond had issued her orders. “It would be good, Tim, if you stuck to your ward and even to your cot.” She must know he had an impulse to go and show Winnie his face.

Taking the beads down from the mosquito net bracket, he dosed himself asleep with the repeated, numb Aves. First Sorrowful Mystery, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Let this cup pass from me. And if it does, then the other cups to be drunk, the ones waiting for him in Belgrave Street, at Templars’ Hall, off Crescent Head, in Hanney’s care.

Ernie with lost-looking eyes and Sister Raymond standing over him, Tim was shaken awake at midnight.

“Ring the bell at the kitchen door,” said Sister Raymond. “When the orderlies come, ask for tea.”

She was brightly awake. The emergency blazed in her eyes.

As Tim waited for the metal-strengthened door to be opened, masked Ernie staggered towards him along the corridor.

“She is very bad, she is very bad. And no conversation possible either, Tim.”

One of the ambulance men unlocked the outer door.

“Sister Raymond would like some tea brought.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said the ambulance man, rubbing his brow.

But he came back with the teapot quicker than Tim expected.

“Likely to need us again?” he asked from behind the linen.

“Yes,” said Tim. “I think it’s likely.”

“All right, all right,” said the man, as if someone had been harrying him. He went out and locked the door.

After the normal hygiene, Tim poured out the tea in the kitchen, putting plenty of sugar into Ernie’s. He took it out to Ernie, who was pacing in the hall, and then began carrying a mug towards Sister Raymond when she emerged from the sickroom.

“Prepare yourself, Ernie. Wear the gloves.”

Ernie put his cup on the floor and went off for what might be farewells.

“Do you want tea yourself?” Tim asked the nurse.

“You could leave it by the door in the hallway.”

Carrying the nurse’s tea and setting it by Winnie’s door, Tim saw Ernie lay his covered mouth to Winnie’s unknowing forehead. Sister Raymond then sent him across the room, where at last he lay down on the bare boards like someone doing penance.

Tim, not permitted to join the tragedy but dazed by it anyhow, returned to his cot, slept two haunted hours in his own bed, but woke at the first lightening of the sky. He heard a hammering at the door—the orderlies with breakfast. Sister Raymond answered them, and his mask dutifully in place, Tim helped her carry the bucket of porridge in. When he and Sister Raymond returned towards Winnie’s room, they met Ernie emerging crazed.

Tim, who had not gone to caress Winnie, now clasped plain Ernie in his arms. Erson couldn’t have asked for more giving of comfort: may in fact have asked for less. You could hear Ernie’s plaintive hiccoughs. But no rasp of breath and no noise at all could be heard from lovely, poetical Winnie Malcolm.

The solid feel of Ernie. The thick cage of his bones. Tim had to continue to hold and caress him as the orderlies came and covered her totally and briskly carried her out.

“She will have all the appropriate rites,” Sister Raymond, frowning and pale now, promised Ernie in passing and in the hope of calming him.

Tim and Ernie clumsily following the procession to the door. As the ambulance men worked the stretcher down the stairs, Sister Raymond said, “Let’s close the door now. We have to close it at once.”

Her large, burly, country hands shut them in. Could it be, though? Could Winnie, so august on the shopping mornings of the past years, be crept out so casually? By men whose ordinary leather boots could be heard on the plain wooden steps?

Ernie reared up, trying not only to escape Tim’s clasp. Trying to disappear through the space in his own ribs, and roaring with the loss.

“I must give him something,” Sister Raymond called across the storm of Ernie’s misery.

She went to the dispensary. Tim felt very lonely, struggling with heavy-breathing Ernie. He found himself, as with children, uttering useless things—“Settle yourself, Ernie,” and, “She felt nothing, she was far away.” But he wasn’t himself a mere witness. His own eyes streamed. Sister Raymond brought out some murky fluid for Ernie. “Best to get him to sit on his cot,” suggested the weary nurse.

Tim wrestled blocky, crazed civic Ernie into the big ward, and could only sit him down by sitting down himself as well. The camp cot felt it might collapse under their weight.

She snatched Ernie’s mask away and forced the drug in over his lips. Splashes of brown fluid fell from the process onto Tim’s shirt.

“Damn and bugger you!” yelled Ernie now. But he gave up wrestling with Tim, who stood up and went halfway across the room and surveyed him. Ernie began to grieve in a more orderly way now, doubled over in grief.

Outside curlews and currawongs were everywhere raucous, disclosing as always the fresh day. Bullying the town awake, accompanying the dairy farmer and his lank wife and children back from the milking shed to the porridge pot in the kitchen. Unlyrical, practical birds. Galahs and the rosellas beautiful though, and frequent in the Macleay. The white cockatoos with their crests of sulphur.

Poetry had died with Winnie. No maiden phoenixes new-creating themselves here in West. Only the limepit.

As Tim wept, Sister Raymond came up and took off her glove and put a hand to Tim’s forehead.

“What can you feel with that?”

Ernie was quiet in his cot against the far wall, but Tim took up the grieving for him. And the nurse’s touch so welcome that Tim wished to raise his hand too and grab her fingers.

She said, “While Ernie rests, I must rest too until the doctor comes. I’ve had no sleep.”

“Yes,” Tim assented, composing himself.

The nurse closed their door on them, as a sign that she wanted no intrusions.

Not long gone when Ernie sat up again. He stripped his gloves off and let them fall to the floor, where they sat on splayed fingers. He picked up his watch and watch-chain and—as if to destroy time—hurled them to the floor.

“Go easy there, Ernie, old feller,” Tim advised him.

“You’re a bloody peasant, Tim,” Ernie complained.

Tim felt nothing but weariness. A swimmer without a stroke left in him. Kitty on the shore, frowning out to sea, could not be reached.

“You’re right, Ernie. Go very kindly to sleep, will you?”

“Winnie in your store, Tim. Your eyes were out on bloody sticks. Peasant bloody wonder…”

“Winnie is a splendid woman,” said Tim, choosing wilfully to speak about her as a presence. “You’d blame me more if I didn’t know that. Now please. You’ll disturb the poor nurse.”

“I suppose you think she’s a lady too, you stupid bushweek dolt?” The opiate had brought out aggression in Ernie. It was said to do that. The patient went best ignored.

“I have been so lucky with beautiful women,” said Ernie. But his luck made him wail for half a minute. “You think Winnie’s a noble spirit, don’t you, Tim? Winnie bloody Lady Guinevere? Reads poetry and yearns for refinement, and doesn’t get it in her poor bloody husband! Her old man though, her father the Brighton alderman, gave her piss-elegant old mum a social disease. And he… he was just one of those plain Melbourne fellows who killed himself when their shares went bust at the end of the boom. Didn’t tell you that I bet, not while she was buying the bloody bickies! Half bloody Melbourne offed itself in those days. Country’s never bloody recovered till now! Melbourne’s Australia’s elegant city, she’d say. Palaver. Melbourne’s a city of bloody horrors. Above all for the Belle of Brighton, Miss Winnie! Clapped mother, shot father!”

Tim managed to sit up straight preparatory to going across the room. But whether to hit or soothe Ernie was the question. Ernie’s pupils as huge as a cat’s now, Tim saw. His features were dissolving. Coming apart in his own sea. He wailed and wailed, and Tim eased him down. Sleep came to him suddenly, at a gulp.

Now Tim took Winnie’s letter out from beneath his mattress. It constituted a small risk beside having been kissed. The envelope was addressed to the Solicitor General of New South Wales, Macquarie Street, Sydney. It was easy to justify opening the thing—thereby, he argued with himself, he would know best how to protect Winnie, to champion her intentions.

He discovered a photograph backed by stiff cardboard. Missy looked clearly and knowingly at him from this picture. He looked again—he knew from the cricket match that care had to be taken with this identification. Missy. Not some child-woman from up or down the river. But Missy, dressed in a boy’s school uniform. She stood full length, and a banner over a painted scene behind her said, Tyler’s Touring Company. Indented across the top was the slogan: Miss Florence Meades in her Noted Role as Young Arthur. Her firmset shoulders were a fair imitation of a boy’s.

“Miss Florence Meades,” said Tim. The name was out. It escaped the barred room. It sat in the trees. That plain and essential name.

Miss Florence Meades—it seemed—was one of those young actresses who made a speciality of playing smartalec, mischievous boys from the best schools. She would have made a fine Desdemona though as well, Tim thought.

Some inscription in the bottom corner had been obscured by scratchy lines of ink. It had been deliberately and permanently rendered unreadable. On the back of the cardboard, in pencil in a cursive hand was written: Miss Meades is the young woman found deceased in the Macleay.

The handwriting was probably a disguised version of poor Winnie’s.

Ernie cried out in his sleep, as well he might. “Criminal,” said Tim to the vacant day. “Criminal.”

After one more calm survey, Tim returned the picture to its envelope, the whole thing to the breast pocket of his coat, where it sat beside his re-pocketed and useless statement of innocence. Winnie had scraped Ernie’s name out, had been uselessly loyal even in her fury. Did this doped lump of guts on the other cot across the room deserve such delicacy, a right to be harboured so kindly?

He knew the routine. He went and washed his hands with the carbolic soap which scoured the flesh. The name he had found would be released more widely than in a plague ward. It would cow the guilty everywhere, he promised himself.

Dr. Erson came later in the day, letting himself in with his key. At his shoulder, a refreshed Sister Raymond looked at Tim with clear eyes above her mask.

“Has Mr. Malcolm taken it calmly?” Erson wanted to know.

“He’s spoken in his sleep a lot,” said Tim.

He raised his chin so that the doctor could feel his glands. The name was out. Tim rejoiced secretly. Young Arthur was released from the glass.

“You have no swellings or fever, it seems,” said Dr. Erson almost in admiration. “Your pulse is normal. I approve of that, Tim, and would be grateful if you maintained it.”

A little irony in the doctor’s eyes.

“I intend to do that,” said Tim.

But Ernie refused to awaken to be chastised, and the more Tim waited, looking across the room at Ernie’s homely shape, the less scandalised Tim felt and the more an air of pity and forgiveness took over in the room. He was sure he knew where it came from. The Communion of Saints. Winnie and Florence Meades, Primrose and Lucy and Albert Rochester. The lenient dead.

It did not come from him. He was determined to punish Ernie at an early or late date, whichever proved more advisable.

In the coming time, Tim would wake at intervals with imagined fevers. Four or more times a night the frenzied awakening. In the first gulping moment his hand would race to his underjaw, his underarm. Feeling for the swelling. “Rock hard,” as Sister Raymond had sadly declared, feeling beneath Mrs. Malcolm’s chin.

Dreams of resting like a peasant beneath a huge tower, one of those great stone cylinders monks had built a thousand years ago on the Cork and Kerry coast as shelters from the Vikings. His tower the eternity of Kitty’s widowhood. The coldness of its stone entered his kidneys. Is that a shiver? Am I hot, or is it just night-fear?

Winnie the quietly dead, the softly remembered. More notably, the named Missy, Florence Meades and Young Arthur, had grown inactive at last in his brain. She did not step in through the bars to harry him.

If he woke after first light, there would be sudden, chancy joy. His mind would rub over the smoothed-out, recalculated odds of his chances of rising living out of quarantine.

According to newspapers left by Kitty or her messenger Habash at the hospital later in the week, fishermen at Crescent Head had been attracted by a stench beneath the Big Nobby and had thought it might be Lucy. It proved to be the body of a rare narwhal which had been thrown up on the rocks by the tide.

So Lucy still evasive. Not willing to present herself. Placed at the peak of the ocean she could see and judge him. And by staying out to sea and putting sombre questions, she had turned the Muslim jockey round to the valley’s most visible theology, the one that had the presbytery, the two-storey convent, the boarders two-by-two, the Angelus tower.

Sister Raymond dosed Ernie to the point of incoherence these days. Barely a finished sentence escaped him. Yet once or twice a surge of mad animation. One night Tim awoke to hear Sister Raymond shouting and her bell clanging, calling the orderlies from their hut in the grounds. Tim, in his shirt and drawers, ran into the corridor and then the recently fumigated room where Winnie had died earlier in the week, and where the nurse still slept. Ernie in a night dress two-thirds luminous from moonlight, standing over the nurse’s cot. Tim grabbed him from behind. His body felt to Tim like a warmed boulder.

“I just wanted to touch your face,” Ernie yelled.

One of the orderlies volunteered to spread his swag on the boards in the corridor against the arousal of further childlike desires in Ernie. Yet despite this molestation, Sister Raymond nursed him lovingly. To be fair to Ernie, it was easy to see how—child to mother—he could seek her out in the night.

At last she began to take Ernie for walks in the garden. She made sure that Tim knew he was welcome to accompany them, since Ernie had an old man’s stagger and no conversation. Through the scattered gum trees she led the masked two of them towards the edge of the unregenerate bush fringing the Warwick Racecourse and the cemetery. Primrose and Winnie had taken this path, but no one else walked here and the blowflies distracted the party from its grief. Afternoon sweat showed at the points of Sister Raymond’s cheeks and under her veil on her brow. Ernie content in his drugged state, a man willing to be mutely unhappy, one who had half-forgotten the causes of his misery.

The progress was slow.

“Does Mr. Kerridge the stonemason know that if spared I’ll be needing to see him?” Ernie asked suddenly one afternoon while he and Tim and Sister Raymond returned through the straggle of saplings into the garden and up to the old mad barracks.

“I’ve already sent a message,” said Sister Raymond, but like one who probably hadn’t.

“I want something that will draw all the town’s attention to this tragic thing,” said Ernie.

Meanwhile, Tim could tell Dr. Erson was beginning to feel less despair, and touched their glands and their brows more jovially with each day. “Lucky chaps it isn’t typhus or some such. Quarantine of ten days after the last death is considered utterly adequate for plague. The Black Death doesn’t hang about the place being subtle.”

Late in that quarantine time, Ernie suddenly showed himself to be more clear-headed. Up he got, looking for one of his clean, fumigated shirts, and the white and yellow tie he’d been wearing the day the emergency had begun. For the first time he picked up his watch and its medallioned fob. Time had become once again of some interest to him. As Tim watched him from across the room, he put on his jacket to go walking with Sister Raymond.

“Can we go to the grave?” he asked as they neared the cemetery.

“We can’t go too close,” said Sister Raymond wearily.

“You think I’ll be unruly,” Ernie smiled sadly. “I won’t be unruly. I want to visit it. Like any mourning husband.”

“So I have a promise from you?” asked Sister Raymond. “You won’t get distressed.”

“Certainly I won’t.”

They headed off to their right, downhill, amongst Australia’s own go-to-hell, deliberately unpleasing and perennial shrubs. Hardy, dull olive in colour. Lean, canny branches. Perhaps they grew in Eden before God even knew. Perhaps they came after the Fall. The cemetery lay ahead, the lost town of Macleay people, beneath its collection of Celtic crosses and broken columns, its occasional standing marble angel.

The first thing they came to, on the hospital side of the informal cemetery fence, was the grave. Covered not only with earth but with planks, as if it were not yet fully filled in. Still a chance that one or two more might need to be put there. Tim saw Ernie’s face bunch and grow piteous.

“On the edge of a cemetery, and in quicklime! Like someone bloody hanged! Like Mrs. Mulroney!”

Sobs started out of him again. Mrs. Mulroney hadn’t been hanged yet, had she? The name Florence Meades was needed for her trial.

“Poor Winnie’s dignity taken away,” moaned Ernie. Ernie said, “If she had not been so kind in nursing Primrose and the bloody cat!”

Even on the seventh evening since Winnie’s death, night came on with its acid dread and fidgets and false fevers, and Kitty’s remembered visage seemed a lost hope yet again. Dr. Erson calmer, sagely taking pulses, feeling for fevers without expecting to find them. As Sister Raymond looked on like one unlikely to be required to offer consolation.

Before he left for the night, Erson turned to Tim and said, “Mr. Shea, I must congratulate you on your technical survival of the plague.”

Tim asked, “Technical?”

“Well,” said Dr. Erson, seeming to be enjoying himself at last, to think himself a real wag, “should you develop the signs tonight, you would be entitled to feel discriminated against by the odds. As it is, I’ve told your friends and relatives to greet you both at the front of the hospital at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

A strange berserk joy in this promise of reunion. Like schoolmasters all at once lenient at the year’s end, the orderlies left the barracks door unlocked until nine o’clock, and Tim wandered in the garden and sat for a time on a bench, looking up at what was so brightly evident. Venus, Orion—that’s a good one, with his tail, his sword, his handle. The Southern Cross, emblem of migration. People crowding up to the taffrail somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The navigation officer pointing upwards. There, there.

Ernie came out, no longer masked, sat near him on a bench and lit a cigarette. A widower. He too looked upwards.

“Winnie, are you there?” He sighed and puffed. “Answer came there bloody none.”

Despicable, pitiful Ernie. Had he ever invoked the stars for Missy? Now he concentrated on the humbler glowing star of the cigarette end, which he held before him at chin level.

“You’ve been a white man to me, Tim, through all this.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t know me, Ernie, before your mob wrote their letters to supply houses.”

Ernie murmured, “I bloody told you. I take no pride in overzealous business like that.”

“Will you write me a reference? Will you break with your friends and say I’m an honest fellow? Now we’re in the land of the living, Ernie?”

Ernie thought awhile. “You say that, Tim. Not all of us really with the living though. Not all.”

Albert, Lucy, Missy, Primrose, Winnie. The holy, diverse ever-present departed.

“Ernie, I see the signs of mending in you. You’ve put on your bright medals again, haven’t you. You’ll want to be a father of our city. West, Central, East.”

“Tim. It’s all hollowness…”

“The injustice that’s been done me and others. Is that hollow, Ernie?”

“Come to me, Tim, then, when I go back to the dreary bloody desk, the dreary bloody office. I’ll see what I can do for you. You’ve been a white man…”

But Tim could taste stale reality on his tongue. The same nonsense, saving and beginning. And then the lies, the contentions, the same ruinous enthusiasms. In the earth, solely Kitty, the thought of Kitty, did not weary him. Apart from that, a hemispheric weariness from here down the huge coast and over limitless water and ice to the South Pole. Weariness across the snow there like a stale yellow light.

Turning a shoulder, Ernie withdrew himself. He was looking at the piercing stars again.