A River Town

Thirteen

SULLEN AFTERNOON for Tim’s and Ernie’s release. Bulky, plum-blue clouds conspired above the mountains and casually threatened the valley. They would bring a great gush of air behind them, a great coolness. At such an hour as this Lazarus had emerged. Under such biblical clouds.

Carrying their portmanteaus. They had still not exchanged names with the ambulance men. But having thanked them earnestly, Tim and Ernie walked around the side of the building like two workmates going off a shift. At the end of their imprisonment, short in time but intense in content, they moved edgily, unused to the outer world.

Rounding the side of the verandah where he had unloaded poor Albert, Tim saw first someone who meant least. M. M. Chance, standing by his sulky under the big Morton Bay fig at the front of the hospital. Waiting for his bereaved friend. Ernie walked to him like a soldier surrendering, Chance reaching a hand out, drawing Ernie back to the community’s daily offices. Over his shoulder, Ernie looked across at Tim, as if what terrified him most was that Chance would lift him into the vehicle and cart him away.

“You’re welcome to stay with Mrs. Chance and me until you’re steady again,” said Mr. Chance.

“Mrs. Chance has been reassured by Dr. Erson about the plague?” asked Ernie.

“She’s an educated woman,” said M. M. “She knows you don’t get the plague from people looking at you.”

Kitty and the children were beyond the gates standing by the gold and blue T. Shea—General Store dray. Pee Dee, the old fool, his bag on, deigning to wait, not to back the cart through the hospital fence. And familiar horses of a different order waited a little further down the hill—Bandy’s grey and his beautiful roan, and by their heads, side by side with reins in their hands, stood Bandy and Mamie. Mamie had ridden up here on the roan. It had a woman’s saddle on it. Tim was tickled somehow by the idea of his sister-in-law the horsewoman. What a goer, that Mamie!

By the dray, Kitty waited, grinning a big, criminal grin. He gave himself up to the first huge embrace, the children taking a part at the edges. Kitty’s mouth full of affection and warm spittle, and her face moist.

“I knew that scapular would see you out, Tim,” she wetly cried, and delight and hope and terror went through him and brought out his tears…

“Are we broke yet?” he asked her.

“It’s a mixed bag. I’ll certainly be telling you.”

“I am a victim of injustice,” Tim confided to her.

“But the fleas didn’t bite you, so let it go at that.”

He did let it go at that, let his limbs hang, and her arms encircled him at the elbows. When strength returned he lifted Annie, whose face was full of a terrible confidence in his immortality. Johnny kept a distance.

Meanwhile Bandy and Mamie closed in together. Their unison seemed strange. They smiled foolishly.

“Give your congratulations to the engaged couple,” Kitty told him.

“Is this so?” Tim asked. He felt a surge of outrage but a kind of innocence in Bandy’s face chastened Tim when it came to expressing outrage.

“Bandy is accepting instruction as a Catholic,” said Mamie blithely.

“Well,” said Tim. “Well. I’d heard that earlier on.”

“Wish them every happiness, you miserable old bugger,” said Kitty. “The happiness we have.”

“Oh, I do, of course I do,” said Tim. “You don’t come out of the plague hospital for the purpose of cursing people.”

“I should hope bloody not.” Kitty was laughing. She who had always been at home to Bandy.

“I will be a very obedient husband,” Bandy told him. “I will give up the reckless expense of racehorses.”

“Don’t make rash promises,” said Tim. “Just because you’re getting married.”

Though he’d meant it in strict terms, everyone seemed to find it hilarious.

“God you’re such an individual, Tim,” said Kitty.

“I’d like some black tea with rum in it and a large lump of fruit cake. Does our present condition permit such luxuries?”

“Buckets of tea. Pounds of cake!”

Both Kenna sisters uttered their totally individual laugh.

“Wild horses!” cried Tim though. For a sulky was thundering up the hill out of West. He could see it was driven along by his friend the Offhand, and seated in it by his side, holding her hat, was the little wisp of widow with whom rumour associated him. The rumour publicly declared today in this stormy light.

Offhand, pink-faced from the rush, drew the sulky up and tied the reins to a gum tree on the far side of the road. Rough old road which led to the upriver demesne of Old Burke, to Comara, and in the end, by breakneck escarpments to Armidale. As the Offhand came running across the road, Kitty and Mamie and the children stood back, so clearly was Tim in the Offhand’s sights. He drew Tim aside without apology.

“There is nothing to say,” Tim warned him. “No bloody tales of the plague ward. Except there isn’t any Boer War in there. And let me tell you, the plague keeps different bloody lists than at Templars’ bloody Hall.”

Panting Offhand held his hands up. “You are entitled to your chagrin. But I’m talking to you for the last time, Tim. My fiancée Mrs. Flitch has agreed to marry me, as women will—it’s typically when my affairs are at their worst. I have no job, Tim. I have been dismissed by the management board of the Macleay Chronicle. Australis, you see. I wrote those letters off to the Argus for a joke. Regretted them straight after the first one, when people began to attribute them to you. I laid low though, thinking, damage is done! Might as well finish with my rodomontade, might as well cover the canon of my concerns. Then I kept postponing the confession, Tim. Hit me if you want.”

It’s always your friends who do you the worst harm. Tim would need to pretend to be furious, when what he felt was weariness. “I don’t bloody well want to hit you. A hit isn’t enough.”

“Tim, Tim,” murmured the Offhand and looked very ill. “Let’s at least part friends. The fact is I am emigrating to America. I have a sister there. San Francisco and Oakland are excellent newspaper towns, I am told. If mistakes made in the rest of the world are unknown in Australia—just ask half the doctors on this coastline if that’s not true, half the older men married to younger women too—the converse is that mistakes made in Australia are unknown in the wider world! I go with a reference as to my editorial competence, and with little else. The editorial board are very happy to foist me onto the Americans. They say I’m too puckish for the bush.”

Tim whistled to himself.

“Puckish? They say you were puckish. I wish they’d say that about me, I wish they wrote my crimes so bloody low. They say I’m so despicable that they need to write to the supply houses and cancel my credit! You’re sent off with a reference. I’m on my own.”

“Oh, I’ve written a full confession which shall appear, and an exhortation to sanity. Last Tuesday, Tim, the news came that Ladysmith had been relieved. The British column had at last broken through to rescue the gritty garrison, et cetera, et cetera. Now you would have thought that the gentlemen of the Patriotic Fund would have danced in the streets of Central. But no such thing. An ordinary day of business. No giddiness, no great municipal gasps of relief! They still smoke their pipes and clang their cash boxes and milk their bloody cows! I’ve written this in my last piece. It is already composited. Might do some good.”

“I hope to Christ you didn’t mention me!”

“Ah, you think I have a poison touch, don’t you, Tim. No, though I do mention certain businesses in the Macleay district which have been singled out, and so forth. But Tim, let me say, for any harm I’ve done you, please accept this.”

He took an envelope from his vest pocket and pushed it into Tim’s hands. “There’s fifteen pounds in there. It’ll pay for some things.”

“No,” Tim said. “I can’t take this.”

But the Offhand had skipped backwards, waving his hands. Already making for his sulky and Mrs. Flitch. “Won’t take it back, Tim,” he called.

He untethered and jumped aboard his vehicle so fast that for Tim to chase him to argue would have been out of kilter with this afternoon, this plain plague resurrection on which the first grand drops of rain were beginning to fall.

Tim went to Kitty flapping his arms like a helpless bird.

“Fifteen quid,” he told her.

“All contributions welcome,” she said, grinning, reaching up and drawing him down towards her breasts, her paunch. Their child readying itself in secrecy. He noticed Johnny staring now, an unlikely, still gaze.

“He has not been himself,” said Kitty.

In the world again, he did not like the counter so much, did not like to stand there at the mercy of whatever person entered. It had in any case proved an unwise procedure in the past. Women to whom he made deliveries now were of course possessed by a fear that he had not been long enough in quarantine. They would call out from deep in the house, “Just wait, Mr. Shea. Wait in the yard. I shall leave the money on the back step, and then you can come up and collect it.” Was Ernie finding the same, and in his grief did he care? Did people look fearfully at pages he had audited and passed his finger down.

In the residence dining room one mid-afternoon, a conference was called around the table. Kitty sat close to him. He noticed how sure she was that the omens had lifted from him, how exultant to have him back, certified by Erson. He and Kitty sat together at the top of the table. At the side of the table Bandy and Mamie sat, Mamie with a languid hand on her fiancé’s forearm.

“Bandy’s been reading Irish history now,” said Mamie, and Bandy—not wanting to be showy with his knowledge—murmured, “The plantations of Ireland. Cromwell crying, ‘To Connaught or to Hell!’ ”

He was such a willing enthusiast for his new fidelity, his new systems of loves.

“We need to circumvent the hatred they have always had for us,” said Bandy like a Fenian. “Your wife and I, Tim, have devised an arrangement.”

“From here on, the accounts at the supply houses will be in Bandy’s name,” Kitty explained. “He’ll receive the bills and underwrite them, though we’ll pay them. I think it’s generous in a big way and that he’s a total white man.”

“Not in exact terms,” said Tim, and everyone laughed.

Kitty said, “See, we have that safety net. Bandy’s our long stop.”

Bandy beamed diagonally across the table at Tim. The services he had been threatening to offer Tim from the start, the system of generosity, was now in place, and Tim and Kitty such poor beggars they couldn’t refuse it all. And gratitude was the only right emotion. But Tim felt resentment. Even of Mamie, so recently landed and now with an edge on her sister.

“Ernie Malcolm promised me a reference,” he said, and the three of them, the two sisters and Bandy, looked at each other and pursed their lips at his gullibility.

“We are a family now,” said Kitty. “A wonderful thing to have the strength of it behind a person.”

She caressed Tim’s shoulder, an indulgent caress. As if she believed his quarantine, the daily fear of plague which had occupied him in the old barracks, had left him incapable for the time being.

Bandy and Mamie rode together to Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Father Bruggy in his golden cope, raising up the species of bread which masked the substance of Christ. In a gold monstrance for the adoration of the engaged couple.

Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the sparing of Tim and the discovery of each other. Plus thanks for the conversion of the infidel. Mamie’s charm had done what the Crusaders couldn’t.

At these times, the children asleep, Kitty and Tim were left alone at the big sandsoaped table, the broad surface of their marriage.

“You don’t say much,” said Kitty. “What do you think of Bandy? As regards Mamie, is what I mean.”

“I think it could be recklessness. To have a Muslim father-in-law. And what about poor bloody Joe?”

“Oh, someone will get sick of seeing Joe stand around calf-eyed and marry him just for the chance of educating him. That’s how it happened with you.”

“A just point,” Tim said. He stood up to pour Kitty more tea. Tay, she called it, like a peasant. But that hadn’t stopped her understanding the way things went in New South Wales.

She asked, “What would you think if I told you Bandy’s already put up cash? That I’d borrowed the whole of our debt from Bandy? The little feller’s rolling in it, you know. A wealthy young man, not a drinker. No women to spend money on. No children. And seems to think we are his relatives.”

“I’d say I don’t want to depend on him.” In fact he felt the beginning of tears. Have I travelled so far to be someone’s tenant all over again?

Kitty shrugged, reached for his wrist, and put her head on its side. “It’s happened, I’m afraid. We signed an agreement letter. Something had to be arranged, darling. Something had to be managed! Be angry if you have to be.”

But he couldn’t manage anger. Anger was for those lucky buggers who had some power left. “Dear God! Was this before or after Mamie agreed to marry the little individual?”

“Fair play, Timmy! Do you think I’d sell my own sister? Only the bloody nobility do that sort of thing. No. She always thought he was Christmas. I mean, Tim, can you see Mamie lying still for being an item of sale?”

“I thought she was just pretending to like the hawker, see. Just to get at Joe.”

Kitty shook her head with such energy. “From the first time he came into the plague camp, down the river selling things. From that time, she thought he was Christmas.”

“So how much did you borrow, Kitty?”

“It was a full two hundred pounds.”

Again, it was too large a sum to remonstrate over. All he did was drink his tea with its rum lacing. He’d need a lot more rum. “Bloody mad,” he then said sombrely. Yet he felt both exhilarated too, as well as tethered. “We are bound to the little fellow for eternity.” He uttered it like a matter of fact. “But two hundred. Why did you need so much, for God’s sake?”

“Because. I have bought Elliott’s old store in East.”

He stood up without knowing it. East! There was joy in that idea. The river between him and his Central foolishness. The idea of the river sliced through him now, dividing him, putting all that was foul on the further bank.

“Jesus, is this really true?”

“We’ll primp the place up. Great deal more space than here. When the bridge opens… well, we’ll be on the pig’s back!”

All too much, too fast! In a rush, the tide ran out and left him stranded.

“Did you think I’d be dead?” he asked. “And you’d never have to account to me?”

She wouldn’t answer and her cheeks reddened, bringing forth a freckle or two. She rose from the table, waddled inside, came back with a large dossier of documents and slung them down in front of him. “I kept this for you, Tim. Read this and don’t insult me.”

He fingered the dossier. A marvel how much had been done in a period of quarantine. Her arts of business let free by his absence. There wasn’t any question about that.

“Though you’d be much better to wait till morning before addressing the details,” she advised him.

Tim wanted to know. He felt indeed too tired, even a little sore-headed for business.

“How much interest is the little Punjabi asking?”

“There is no interest. He says it is a crime to charge interest to members of his family. He wants repayment and a tenth part in the business, that’s all.”

In East, though, they would draw on the populations of Dock Flat and Pola Creek as well as on flasher residences on Rudder’s Hill. It was an idea! Again the waters commenced to run and he was excited in spite of himself.

Before they went to bed, he visited his sleeping son and daughter. Annie’s cheek, and the scar line on Johnny’s head. Johnny still slept like someone concentrating for a dive. He’d been chastened, said Kitty, and spoke in his sleep. Each day perhaps half his soul went down the cliff with Lucy’s.

He touched the boy’s head. “We are going to East,” he whispered.

He saw one day, while passing the creamery in Smith Street, Ernie Malcolm in a dove-grey suit, somehow apt for the season of mourning, passing down the pavement and entering the staircase to his offices. The Argus had carried a piece,

The gist was that Ernie had chosen to lose himself in his accounting.

So at last Ernie had been declared brave in his own right, and as senselessly as Tim had first been.

Tim had imagined unleashing the girl’s name the second after his release from the plague ward. But a Saturday and Sunday followed his release, and so he had secreted Winnie’s envelope with the photograph of boy-impersonating Missy in the London Illustrated News, the 1891 edition with the flood marks and the views of Uganda ceded to Britain by Germany in exchange for Heligoland. Having lived and been returned to the great turbulence of events, he was too stupefied for the first few days, but by late on the Sabbath he had begun practising a false hand on scraps of paper. Because he must write his own letter, as he saw it. Winnie was not here to rescue Missy. He was the living rescuer.

It began to strike him too that he needed to retain Missy’s picture with Winnie’s contrived handwriting on the back.

On Monday morning he wrote his letter on some Aberdeen Line notepaper he’d been keeping since his emigration voyage more than ten years back. The moist Macleay air had by now spotted its creaminess with little discs of brownish stain.

The letter said that the Commissioner of Police for New South Wales, situated in Sydney, who sought a name in the Mulroney case, should enquire from Tyler’s Theatrical Company, presently touring somewhere in the Australian colonies or perhaps in New Zealand. He said what the young performer’s name was, and added that she seemed to have a repute for playing the role of Young Arthur. He posted this communication in its staged hand at Central Post Office, together with Kitty’s renewal of subscription to The Messenger of the Sacred Heart, the Sheas’ credit being at least better with that divine organ of mercy than it was with Truscott and Lowe.

Missy’s name would be uttered at the Mulroneys’ trial, and the order of things thus restored. He had at last a sense that Missy was now a redeemed vacancy. His dreams were a jangled mess of things from the plague hospital, and he was content that they should be. Missy no longer entered. Her plain name had saved him, and he had taken her as far as could be expected of ordinary flesh. There was still a distance which she could perhaps take him. For that reason he had retained her photograph.

The affianced Mamie, walking over to Savage’s Emporium on some business for Kitty, ran into her sister from up the river, Mrs. Molly Burke. Molly had come to town with her husband and daughter, and without rushing to report to their relatives in the general store or to introduce Old Burke to the new immigrant, they had taken rooms at the Commercial. Though the two sisters embraced, Mamie later said there was something about the meeting which did not measure up. It did not resemble the previously imagined reunion of Mamie with the grandest and most successful Kenna.

That evening the Sheas, Mamie and the children were eating a normal meal when Old Burke and Molly did appear at the back door. Molly was chastened, embarrassed at having been seen to creep into town.

“We thought you were worried about Timmy and the plague,” Kitty remarked, winking. They had not heard about it though, and now were informed—chiefly by Kitty and Mamie. All Tim did was hold his hands up and say, “Clean bill of health.”

“Not here on pleasant business,” Old Burke growled through his clenched pipe. Sitting at table and humbly accepting tea, it didn’t seem as if he was going to be infallible on any subject at all tonight. They sat severely apart, Old Burke and the Molly he had so strenuously courted in the store. They were not a united camp. This fact at once paired, allied and reconciled Mamie and Molly. Molly’s hand reached out to Mamie’s wrist, wriggled it.

“So, my little sister,” said Molly. “Here!”

“No other place,” said Mamie. “And very glad I came.”

But the sisterly jollity still seemed forced and silences intervened. Some sorrow had overtaken Molly. She did not even comment on what she must surely by now know—that her sister was engaged to the hawker.

“Look, might as well say it,” Old Burke soon announced. “We are putting Molly and Ellen on the boat. That’s the situation. I expect it to go no further than your ears, but Ellen has conceived.”

He shook his head and wiped his eyes.

“Some lop-eared boundary rider from Comara,” he said.

“How long?” breathed Kitty. Tim wanted to know too. Could it have been when the girl was in his care? Was this too on his slate?

“Seems to’ve been some time in December last,” said Molly.

All the women exchanged glances. They knew the perils, the hair’s-breadth nature of things. Was Flo or Missy present in the room to gaze quietly down on the constant risks of womanhood revealed here?

Molly said, “Thank God for Croydon.”

Tim realised she meant a suburb of the great capital down the coast.

“That’s Saint Anthony’s Home for Fallen Girls at Croydon we’re taking her to,” Molly explained to her newcomer sister.

“So you’re going to Sydney?” asked Kitty. “With the plague raging there?”

“Well, you did,” Molly told her a little testily. “Would you have Ellen stay on at Pee Dee until she shows, and bring her to town then?”

“Where is she now?” asked Mamie.

“She is in her room at the Commercial,” said Old Burke. “On retreat. Reading a devotional book as she should have done earlier. Flirtatious, you see. She’s flirtatious by nature.”

He glanced at Molly. He blamed his young wife for some of it, for a lack of gravity.

“Well, Jesus,” Kitty protested, “women are. Need to be too. To get you bloody crowd going.”

Molly sat back in her chair. She looked very tired. “Ask us the questions you’ve got to ask us,” she told them. “Who’s the father, for example?”

“Well,” said Old Burke, supplying the answer for his wife to get it done with. “She won’t say. And I remarked to her, does this mean there is more than one blackguard? And instead of a clear answer, I get tears.”

Molly said, “I’m glad I was there at Pee Dee. Men can take a hectoring approach.”

“And a bloody man is behind this,” said Kitty, lightening the discussion with wise and emphatic shakes of the head. “There’s only one Virgin Birth. The story’s used up.”

Both the other women laughed guiltily at this blasphemy from Kitty. Old Burke looked at Kitty with amazement.

“She’s foolishly protecting her lover,” said Molly with a twisted mouth.

“Don’t dignify him with a word like lover,” growled Old Burke. “He’s a brute and a bloody ram.”

As if Old Burke had never ridden high. But this was an awful and wilful scandal, Tim could see.

Old Burke said, “God, she flirts even with that Indian bastard, what’s his name? Haberdash? Molly herself’s no better.”

Mamie instantly flushed. No delays in the Kenna crowd showing their feelings. “I have news on that,” said Mamie. “I am engaged to Mr. Habash and don’t appreciate wordplay on his name, Mr. Burke.”

Molly lowered her fine eyes. She hadn’t been told after all. Old Burke paused in gouging away at his pipe.

“Mr. Habash is receiving instruction in the Faith,” Mamie added.

Molly wiped at a sudden sweat on her upper lip. “He’s hung around all of us, you know,” she scoffed, wanting to draw blood. “Until he found someone simple-minded enough.”

There was jealousy here. It betrayed Molly into letting on to things she wouldn’t let on to in her normal wisdom. Jealousy of the hawker!

“Well, thank you,” Mamie said, flaming. “That’s a grand estimation of me…”

But she stopped there because Old Burke threw his pipe down on the plate before him.

“You bloody Kenna women have gone utterly astray in your bloody minds!” he yelled.

The outburst brought a little silence at first. But it was a rope thrown to the sisters. Molly decided to sit forward and grab it. “So my family are to take the blame for this tragedy? For spoiling your daughter?”

She blazed and it was not all rage at Old Burke. But he served as the first victim and deserved to as well, the old fool. Molly would punish him at length later as well. He’d be treated to the turned shoulder at night when she got back to Pee Dee.

Old Burke could foresee this and became more plaintive. “I just think there’s an air of conspiracy gets going when women are together.” He’d widened the accusation from just the Kenna girls to the whole gender. “It isn’t always for the best, you know.”

The three women frowned communally at him. Of course this was Mamie’s first meeting with Old Burke. Old Burke was Molly’s fortune, the rumour which had brought Mamie through the Atlantic, the Indian, the Southern Ocean and up the Pacific coast into the Macleay. She had given Old Burke and Molly as an excuse for her migration. It was what Red and Mrs. Kenna had used to soothe their aged tears. This dismal old cow-cocky!

Molly ignored him and spoke to her sisters. “She reckons she’ll raise the child herself in Sydney.”

“All bloody well,” said Old Burke. “But she’s bloody young to pass off as a widow!”

“We will give her every support,” said Molly.

“Goes without saying,” muttered Old Burke.

“She has made it totally clear to me… totally clear,” Molly asserted, “that she will not marry for this cause. Whoever it is… the fellow, she won’t say. And she has made it clear that she won’t marry.”

“She’s been to confession and the sacraments,” growled Old Burke, as if this had a bearing on her decision.

Molly nodded. “That was this morning. And we’re off on Burrawong tomorrow, she and I. By all accounts, it’s fumigated to the last square inch. We’ll have to walk the deck pretending we’re overtaken by an urge to see the Sydney autumn fashions.”

“It’s too bloody believable in her case,” said Old Burke. “Believable she would get an urge like that!”

Tim remembered how well despite their arguments the girl had minded his children. “Give her my warmest wishes,” he said. “And tell her if she should need anything…”

“Yes,” Kitty said, finishing his sentence. “She mustn’t hesitate.”

All the party looked at each other understandingly. They thought his quarantine had left him clumsy, put his social timing off.

“But can’t we go and see her, Molly?” Kitty asked. “Mamie and myself? Sure we could see her. She might be embarrassed by Tim. But Mamie and me…”

Molly said of course. Then she turned back to Mamie. “Sister, do you love this Habash?”

“What an idiot question! I could put the darling little fellow in my pocket and walk the earth’s highways with him.”

“And do you trust him?”

“He’s a bloody scamp and a charmer. But he has taken to instruction like Cardinal Newman!”

Molly looked aged, and shook her head.

“Then God bless you both!”

Everyone but Old Burke could read what all this was. She would not be able to flirt with Bandy when next he came to Pee Dee. The bush was narrowing in on her.

The visit to Ellen was arranged for that evening, and Molly and Old Burke got up to leave. As they went through the house and store towards Belgrave Street, Old Burke hung back a second.

“Fellows tell me you’ve been hugely political, Tim,” he commented with the usual above-human-folly frown.

“It’s nonsense,” Tim told him.

“No. Be careful. You don’t think you’re political, but you bloody are by nature. Keep clear of it all. None of it’s worth a toss. Land is the whole story.”

Blood came to Tim’s face. “Tell them, bugger it!” He pointed off indefinitely towards the powerful and complicated town. “Tell your flash friends to let me live.”

Old Burke stared dolefully. “I think your troubles have got to you, Tim. It might be the start of an education.”

The self-important old streak of misery went and joined Molly, who waited for him by the pavement.

“Thank God I don’t have to ask you for favours,” cried Tim after him.

Molly looked away, but Kitty laughed.

The visit to Ellen was made and Mamie and Kitty came back home to drink tea with a look of mutual placation, of the old sisterly unity, on their faces.

“She really won’t name the feller,” said Molly. “Says if she does Old Burke will force a marriage.”

Both sisters seemed disappointed by this. They wanted to know for knowing’s sake as well. They could have been savage to him in the street when he came to town.

Next morning, a drogher took the Burke women off with Captain Reid and the other passengers, up the river to where Burrawong had moored. Tim’s letter travelled by the same ship. Captain Reid had already announced in the Argus that Burrawong was fitted with new anti-rat hawsers of the kind which had been developed to combat the plague in Calcutta two years before. They had come to the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company too late for lovely Winnie.

A full week after his release from quarantine, Tim sent Bandy to the hospital with a basket of puddings and biscuits for Sister Raymond, and then himself resolutely took from the bookcase the envelope with the inscribed photograph of Miss Florence Meades playing Young Arthur, put it in his breast pocket, decided not to wear a tie, and walked down Smith Street past the curtained Southern Cross Billiard Rooms, the Greek cafe, the Good Templars’, and took to the stairwell—beside Holt’s Ladies’ Fashions—to Ernie Malcolm’s office.

At the head of the stairs, Miss Pollack, from the Rudder’s Hill Pollacks in East, still kept Ernie’s outer office.

He told her he wanted to see Ernie.

“Could I have your name, sir?” she asked in her bush-flash, piss-elegant manner. Her parents would be his future customers with any luck, but he was tired of dancing around people.

“Tim Shea,” said Tim. “I was in plague quarantine with Ernie and his wife.” Watch it or I’ll breathe on you! he implied.

And she was chastened by such a pronouncement, and went and spoke to Ernie, who then appeared haggard in his dove-grey suit at the door of his office, looked out and said, “Oh, yes, Tim. Could you hold hard a few moments?”

As Ernie spoke his eyes darted around towards unseen things in the office. His manner said, “Expect nothing.” Then he near-closed the door on his visitor.

Some minutes passed, but Tim would not take the seat Miss Pollack recommended to him. He wanted Ernie to get a sense of a restless presence in his outer office, and indeed Ernie seemed to, coming to the door at last and wearily murmuring, “Yes, Tim,” ushering him in then with a slack hand.

From Ernie’s office you got a view of the butter factory and the laneway leading to Burrawong’s berth at Central wharf, left vacant—or else taken up by droghers—through the influence of plague. The walls of Ernie’s office were covered with bright certificates, some of them from Melbourne, from municipal councils there. An apostle of service all along Australia’s south-east coast.

“Sit, sit, sit,” sighed Ernie, gesturing to the visitor’s chair, going behind his desk which was covered by files, the ramparts behind which he defended himself against gusts of disabling loss and accusation. He looked once out of the window to the river, but then faced Tim.

“Ward mates, Tim, eh?”

There seemed to be great weariness not so much in the eyes as in the lower face, in a hang-dogginess there.

“You have no bad effects from all that?” asked Ernie.

“No,” said Tim. “Since I had no credit before, and I still have none.”

“Oh, yes,” said Ernie, staring out at the river again for an answer. “Have you thought of going to Queensland, Tim? It’s said to be full of opportunity up there for people of your type.”

“My type? What is my bloody type?”

Ernie shrugged. “You take pretty quick offence at a man who means you no harm at all.”

“You yourself mentioned a reference when we were together in that place.”

“Yes, Tim. A random impulse of generosity.”

“Yes. But it had the features of an undertaking, Ernie.”

“Let me tell you it won’t do you any good. Your credit is shot through the head for some time yet. A solitary reference from me, even if I appended all my honorary secretaryships, would not cut sufficient ice for you, Tim. I must tell you this frankly.”

It was probably the case. All his charitable vanities, all his fussiness about asking for bills to be paid. It had ended with him being swept from the business map of the Macleay.

“What about for my wife then?”

“What, Tim?”

“What if you wrote a reference—to my dictation if you don’t mind—for my wife?”

“You want your wife to be your boss?”

It was what on reflection he wanted: the humble arrangement by which he’d be disciplined and saved. Better than depending on a future brother-in-law.

He said that. “Bloody sight nicer than the alternatives, Ernie.”

“But I don’t know your wife. I think you should just go, actually. Declare your true situation. Leave the business to be picked over by creditors. Queensland, Tim. That’s the go.”

Tim sat back. He was content for the moment with the strong tide of his blood.

“Why don’t you go to bloody Queensland, Ernie?”

“I am, despite everything, settled in here.” Ernie pointed to his walls of certificates. “These are the signs of the man I am. Bereaved, Tim. But solid.” He leaned forward, a man to be congratulated.

At once Tim took from his breast pocket the envelope with the photograph of Missy as a boy. He took the picture out and held it up. Ernie stared at it.

“You notice,” said Tim, “Winnie was careful that you should be saved. She scratched out the inscription. She wrote on the back, but named no one except the girl. Who badly needed to be named.”

Ernie stared at him and had the grace to cover his eyes with his left hand.

“How did you bloody get it?”

“She asked me to post it. But we were quarantined first.”

“You’re right, Tim,” Ernie murmured very calmly. “Winnie very loyal.”

“I just want some reasonable help,” Tim reminded him.

But Ernie raised his head and seemed to begin arguing with an unseen audience. “Tyler’s Touring Company. Premier British Touring Group. From triumphs in New Zealand and before that Fiji, before that again America! Acclaimed in California. Travelling players. Jesus, travelling! Grand repute. Crowned bloody heads. By appointment to the court of. Young Arthur. Tyler’s Touring Company. She came to the house as Young Arthur, wearing actor’s rags from the Tyler Company. Asked for me and Winnie. Primrose said we were not there. Winnie didn’t actually meet her. Poor bloody Primrose did the turning of her away. But Winnie watching from deep inside the house thought straight away, That’s an actress playing a boy. And it was, of course. Astounded that dolt of a sailor Reid didn’t spot it straight off. The role of Young Arthur famous on three continents. Tyler’s a company, of course, you’d never find touring a bushweek place like this! Cities! Golden harbours.” Ernie stood up. “I’d no idea at all Winnie found the picture.” He shook his head. “Only safe thing with women is to have no secrets.”

Tim put the picture away in its envelope and looked up at standing Ernie.

“For an ugly bastard I have known beautiful women,” Ernie told him, his eyes softened and glistening.

“This was a girl though, Ernie.”

Ernie said, “I know that. Met her when I was doing audits for North Coast Cane Company. Big trip to bloody Sydney, Tim. A party at the Hotel Australia. Next day she and I drove out to Watson’s Bay and looked over the cliff. Should’ve bloody jumped. I was proud, Tim. So bloody proud. Thought I was bloody Christmas. Young Arthur. Utter enchantment, but didn’t touch her. Some other bastard touched her. Some other bastard got to her core.”

“Did you tell Winnie that?”

“Wouldn’t believe me. Anyhow, Ernie wasn’t home, was he? On Showground Hill when Flo called there. Since we were friends for bloody life—she’d said so—you would have thought she would have come down to the office in Central, would have gone there first, much closer to the boat. Maybe… well, I thought she might have wanted to claim me, cause trouble between Winnie and… So she went up to the house, and she might have been tired all at once. She’d gotten Mrs. Mulroney’s address from someone. Addresses like that shared amongst women in the know. Actresses and so on. Must’ve got overwhelmed from the sea journey. The strangeness of bloody Kempsey. Sort of blackness of its tone. Dullness. I don’t know. Defeated anyway. And straight to Mrs. Mulroney. No names. Bloody huge final pain. Face in a flask. Do you know this poor bloody girl? I know her, I know her, constable. Her name is poor bloody Flo.”

Flo? What an ordinary tag for something all the elements of earth and sky strained so long to produce. Name of a barmaid. Name of an actress. Flo. Now may your servant depart. At the sounding of that ordinary, bush town, bushweek, jovial name. Name from a picnic to Watson’s Bay. Name of laughter and half a glass of gin after the play. Flo, bloody Flo.

Ernie said, “Have you seen this woman, Mr. Malcolm? Doesn’t look familiar, constable. My sweet little actress. What does that prick Ernie Malcolm think? He thinks the harm’s done already. He cries out and bites his knuckles in private, in his office, behind the door. Harm’s done and can’t be unravelled by a pillar of society coming forward and saying, I took Flo to Watson’s Bay. Flo came here to let me know. No need for me to say that with a big bullet-headed idiot like Hanney making notes and bloody sniffing. I wrote a letter to keep him on that particular job, the hopeless bastard.”

Committing Missy to her dreary route with Constable Hanney! That was a crime, but by his tormented face, Ernie had already discovered the fact for himself.

“No use telling anyone the truth that I never touched the girl. Winnie knew I wanted to touch. The world is too much with us, says Winnie. I can’t explain the excitement, Tim, when I heard of Albert Rochester and the rescue. And Habash talking like a fountain, praising you. Can’t explain the excitement. Thinking, raise a hero in Flo’s name. Bring him forward, let Flo fall into the shadow. Open the bridge and fill the passageway with a screen of bloody heroes. Winnie knew straight away what I was up to, and so we had it out. Over your bravery, Tim. Over Albert Rochester’s remains, the great marriage brawl. Things never went well again. A sober woman. A bloody gin fiend in a week flat! Bloody took to it with a passion!”

Ernie shook his head and sat again. “What can you do with that photograph there?”

“I don’t want to do too much, Ernie. The thing is, I’ve come to the furthest place in the world. If I’m pushed out, it’s the bloody void for me. Not Queensland, do you understand? The bloody void.”

“I can resist any story you spread, Tim. I have plenty of friends.”

“Do they include a new editor of the Chronicle, whoever that may be? Winnie spoke to me, Ernie. Passed the photograph to me. It has to be used for purposes she would approve of.”

They both speculated in silence on this.

“If I yield to you on this, you’ll be back with that picture every week.”

“Only if my customers are warned off, and my suppliers. You know me well enough, Ernie. What I desire is a peaceful life.”

“I never wanted anything but a peaceful life for you, Tim. Until you started to write those things.”

Tim shook his head. “If you still believe I wrote them, watch for the Offhand’s letter of apology.”

Ernie Malcolm shrugged. “Purposes Winnie would approve,” he said.

“Write me the letter of recommendation. Or rather, write Kitty one.”

Ernie inhaled and reached for a sheet of correspondence paper.

The letter Ernie and Tim devised, and took to have typed out on Ernie’s huge typewriter by Miss Pollack, read well enough.

Beneath Miss Pollack’s long fingers, the letter of rescue bloomed. And though Tim might have inherited Bandy as a brother-in-law, fellow believer and shareholder, he had avoided having him as master. His master was Kitty, and he was at peace.

Returning to T. Shea—General Store, Tim made a detour to the bridge, where its planking rose out over the water and threw a shade over the river bank. Here he tore Winnie’s envelope and Missy’s photograph to pieces and floated them downstream. The river would obscure with its silt every fragment.

Missy now was indefinitely blended with her ancestors.