A River Town

One

ANNIVERSARY DAY today. The birthday of Australia, as the newspapers liked to say. Today everyone could suit himself and not fret much about the severed girl.

What Tim Shea loved was to read newspapers in peace. He used his slight fever as an excuse for not going down with Kitty and the children to the New Entrance on the Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s chartered steamer for the day. SS Terara. It stuck entirely to the river, poor old Terara, unlike the sea-going Burrawong. It would creep down the broad, heat-struck reaches of the Macleay towards the sandbar marking off the deep green river from the Pacific’s blue glitter. The old tub would take that peculiar kind of riverine forever to get there too.

It would drift, for example, up to the pier at the Smithtown Creamery to collect further picnickers, and then edge by Summer Island where dengue fever had been a force throughout the New Year. Mosquitoes from ashore there would certainly be able to outpace Terara. So keep the veiling down over your face, Kitty.

Then after another two hours of mudflats and mangroves, Jerseyville.

Kitty, his beloved stranger and spouse, could look at the pub at Jerseyville without nostalgia, though he never could. He’d come close once to getting the license to sell spirituous liquors there. The Jerseyville pub brought out the darker feelings so strong in his character. Whereas Kitty was not touched by nostalgia and regret. She could be imagined pointing to the pub and saying to the children, “That’s where Papa and I nearly lived. Then you would be a Jerseyville kid, Johnny. And you, little sister.”

Last night, he’d taken some influenza mixture provided by Mr. Nance, the pharmacist of West. He was still too drowsy when Kitty bustled up to wake the children. And that was the thing, could he have faced it? Could he have faced the Empire Loyalist effusions of the Chairman of the A and H, Mr. M. M. Chance? The references to our beloved and gracious Majesty the Queen. God forbid anyone should cut into a picnic pie or open an ale bottle in New South Wales unless some old bugger like Chance consecrated the whole bloody indulgence to Her Majesty.

Yet Kitty would have no trouble with any of that. Watching with a smile while Miss Chance and Dr. Erson were persuaded to climb up on the coamings and recite or sing! Kitty could let their references to the perils Britain found herself in in Africa—of Australia’s duty in the face of those perils, of New South Wales’s responsibilities, and all the rest of it—slide off her. To her all that stuff was just like band music at a picnic. It didn’t make a dent in the sunlight. What were matters of private principle to him were matters of what came next to her. A happy, happy soul, that Kitty. Drank stout and farted as unabashedly as a farmhorse, in particular when with child. Melancholy didn’t claim her.

He’d begun fretting in his sleep about the idea Constable Hanney would ride up soon with horrible remains in a bottle of ether or alcohol. And he knew his turn to countenance her was coming. But it could not happen today, when Hanney and his wife were on Terara with perhaps half the population. Excluding the ill like him, the dusky brethren of the native reservations at Burnt Bridge and Greenhill, and those shingle-cutters who could not afford the one and six for adult, the ninepence for child.

He intended to take a folding camp stool into his back paddock. This was in fact part of the high river bank. One section of his property a yard with a shed for his delivery dray, the other a fenced pasture for his turbulent horse Pee Dee. He intended to sit in the yard under the peppertree shade, hear the river close by, read the Argus and the Chronicle, and take an idle interest in what Bryant’s and Savage’s were selling jam and soap for. And try to work up an opinion on whether the Chronicle was more democratic than the Argus or vice versa.

Anyhow, some consideration of these questions in a camp chair in the shade. And he’d take a flask of rum. His aloneness in a town emptied of all the grander people. Very welcome. He’d take a blanket with him too, to lie on, in case the stupor of the day got the better of him.

He sat down on the camp stool behind his residence and store. T. Shea—General Store. Situated in a corner. Where Belgrave Street ran up to the river and then turned at a right-angle to become the chief waterfront street, named after an earlier landholder called Smith. By looking down the lane beside his store and residence, he could take in the bend in the road, parts of bush-fashionable Smith, a section of nearly-as-fashionable Belgrave.

Some black people wandered past his line of sight. Danggadi was the name of the main tribe here. All barefooted, these visitors to town, the men in bits of suits, one coat bright yellow. Where were they going on such a day, with all the shops closed? Talkative ghosts in a town so solidly defined that most of its population could bugger off on a steamer and return to find everything still in place. No dahlias ripped out by the roots, no windows broken.

The river itself now. Another remaining inhabitant. It reached around a bend amongst willows people had planted here in the last half a century. Low yet still three times wider than old world rivers, and deep and richly green.

Take a glimpse too at the mountains in the west richly blue, the underside of a mallard’s wing. So that was it. He’d appreciated his bright surroundings, the unembarrassed light and the blue hills and the deep, navigable Macleay river olive with mud, and the quiescent punt at Central wharf, and then the huge pylons sunk in the water for a coming bridge between Central and East.

And now he could take a mouthful of the rum—ahh, the delicious too-muchness at the back of the throat, the shudder that out-shuddered fever—and then picked up the Argus. For though he respected the Chronicle, the Argus was very generous with its serial by A. A. Druitt, the Dickens of the end-of-century.

The Honourable Delia Hobham was the spirited girl who had made three previous appearances in the serial in the Argus throughout January. She came from somewhere in the West Country of England, since A. A. Druitt made a meal out of what the peasants and servants said to her. “Auw, Miss Delia, there bain’t been no bakin’ powder fur cook to gi’ the pantry a freshenin’ wi’.” A. A. Druitt’s Miss Hobham lived in Hobham Hall with her mother and father, and every day she rode out amongst the villagers and tenant farmers, who called down blessings on her father’s head. Silly buggers!

The father never seemed to turf any tenants off their land. That’s how you knew this was fiction. For the Allbrights at home, landowners of Newmarket in Duhallow, North Cork, took every chance to evict people for their own good and recommend them to emigrate to Massachusetts or Australia. But no one ever mentioned emigration from the Hobham estate. Too busy being grateful to bloody Squire Hobham. So the world was fine if you had a good squire and foul if you had a bad one. What about having none at all? This tale, however, was suitable old world pap to serve up in a place like Kempsey, New South Wales.

The male Danggadi blacks had been followed by a string of women now, and children. Gluey ears and blighted eyes on the young ones. Searching for a bloody carnival in a carnival-less town. From looking at them a man got the momentary, mad, missionary urge to live amongst their humpies and pass away with them. Everyone said they were passing. Poor buggers!

He watched them loping for a time down towards the butter factory near Central wharf.

Out in Belgrave Street—broad because surveyed more than seventy years past by a British army officer from Port Macquarie—the younger Habash brother rode past at a mad pace on a grey. He was of a family of licensed hawkers and herbalists. He’d taken advantage of the empty town to get involved in such riding in the two chief commercial thoroughfares. The bloody little brown-complexioned hawker, in a broad felt hat and black waistcoat and trousers, leaning forward in the saddle. Where were the Habashes from? Somewhere east of bloody Suez for a start. India maybe.

“Bloody slow down!” Tim cried, but not too loudly. Habash’s golden dust hung in the air, held up there by the day’s humidity.

“Jesus,” Tim asked the Honourable Delia, who sat there on the page of the Argus, “where’s the bloody Nuisance Inspector?”

On the Terara probably. Under the awnings. Within sight of Kitty who wore her gossamer veil let down over her pink little oval of a face. Annie his daughter sedate on the forehatch. Such a staid child all the time. Johnny of course wild as buggery at six and a half years, climbing things, threatening to hurl himself over the gunwales.

Holy Christ, that bugger Habash was galloping back down Belgrave Street now! You could see him fleet through the neck of the laneway between T. Shea—General Store and E. Coleman—Bootmaker. Thundering back into the dust he’d already made.

“Do you want me to knock you out of the bloody saddle?” Tim asked of the top branches of the peppertree.

Britain’s griefs in Africa filled the papers. From them the New South Wales Mounted Rifles, recently embarked for Natal, had not yet had time to deliver the mother nation. However… on the masthead page of the Argus, he noticed, flipping backwards and forwards between the sweet, ridiculous drama of the Honourable Delia Hobham and the pages full of harder intelligence, Mr. Baylor, Treasurer of the Patriotic Fund, raised the idea of a Macleay Valley lancer regiment being recruited to send off. To sort out Britain’s African affairs. The Australians would pull the fat out of the fire.

Tim reached out of his chair and picked up the Macleay Chronicle. Tim’s favourite the good old Offhand, editor and chief columnist. No one ever called him by his real name. Through his column he’d become Offhand to everyone. He’d have sent off one of the junior journalists to write of the Terara and would be drinking somewhere indoors today, somewhere dark and cool. Maybe with the skinny little widow, Mrs. Flitch, he visited in West.

There was the Offhand on page nine. “The factors of the British Army in India, on their visit to the Macleay Valley last August, could find from a total of one hundred Macleay horses offered for their perusal only five that were suitable for active service. It would seem that only the most rigorous and widespread breeding programme would produce enough mounts here to save Macleay Valley volunteers from the disgrace of being infantry.”

One in the eye for Mr. Baylor with his plans for a public meeting to raise a regiment. Bloody good for you, son!

Bloody hell, that Afghan or Punjabi hawker was flogging the grey back down Belgrave Street again. He’d been fined just six months back for thrashing some other poor piece of horsemeat down Kemp Street. Then fined again by the Macleay police magistrate for using raucous language with Mrs. Clair, standing on her front steps and accusing her of not paying for cloth he’d ordered especially.

In heavy air, Tim folded his papers and laid them on his camp stool. Somewhere on earth a wind was blowing, and somewhere sleet cutting the faces of men and women. But here it was hard to believe that. The Macleay air at mid-summer was gravid, a first class paperweight. Tim got up and walked past the gate behind which his own eccentric and leaden-footed horse, Pee Dee, stood grazing and ignoring him, and out into Belgrave Street. Down by Worthington’s butchery, the hawker was recklessly yanking the grey around for another assault on Kempsey’s stolid atmosphere. He was lightly whacking the poor beast’s sides, but with such a smile that you thought he must believe the horse was enjoying all this as much as he was.

Tim waited a while in the shade of his storefront. Only when Habash was well-launched did he step forward. Thinking in his dark way, Let the bugger run me down and see what the police magistrate makes of that!

When Tim presented himself in the middle of the road, he saw Habash’s face filled with sudden and innocent alarm. Yes, Tim thought. Yes, I do find myself taking strange risks. He saw Habash reining the horse in crazily to avoid running him down. But the hawker must have put unequal weight on the bridle. The grey slipped and threw the young rider backwards into the street. Tim felt the thud of the falling hawker in his own teeth. Grateful the madness was over, the grey strolled into the shade of Savage’s Emporium, and began to drink from the trough there.

Habash got up laughing and with his neat hands brushing brown dust from his black trousers.

“Bad show eh? I thought everyone but the darkies was down the river.”

He spoke exact English, every word presented as its own unit. It made Tim think of a conjuror, smilingly offering one card after another, but face up. They let too many kinds of different people into Australia for its own good.

Habash swung his right arm to test his shoulder. “Oh God,” he said. “I was putting the grey mare through its paces, you know. I have a notorious weakness for speed and horse-flesh, Mr. Shea.”

“I know,” said Tim, not yielding. “You’re on a good behaviour bond. Here you are bloody breaking it.”

Habash made a noise with his teeth and lowered his head and swung it in an arc. This was some bloody fake act of contrition.

“If I’d known you were there, sir… for I do know the sort of man you are. I have often camped on your sister-in-law’s property upriver.”

Kitty’s younger sister, this was. Molly. She’d emigrated here just five years ago, come up the coast to her sister on SS Burrawong, that floating shame of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company. Lots of very nice-looking, plump, sisterly hugging on the Central wharf. A half-pint like Kitty, actually skinnier than Kitty though, and with a little more restraint. Molly began her Australian career sleeping in the canvassed-off part of the back verandah, near the cookhouse.

A man named Old Burke owned Pee Dee Station, where Tim’s own useless nag came from. Far up in the most beautiful reaches of the river. Old Burke rode in one day with his fourteen-year-old motherless daughter Ellen, and gave Molly Kenna a grocery order to fill out while he went and saw M. M. Chance, the stock and estate agent, and then to complain and drink with other farmers in the Commercial. His daughter was still shopping at Savage’s or drinking cordial at the Greeks’ cafe in Smith Street, pretending this was the big life, and Old Burke had come back into the store with a glow on and thought Molly was a pretty bright girl. What you needed to cheer up a grim homestead and the lonely seasons up at Pee Dee. Rich pasture there, but a bugger of a way up the Macleay!

So now it turned out Habash carried his fabrics and his medical mixtures way up there to Molly.

Tim liked Mrs. Molly Burke and usually said so. She was a natural democrat and put on no airs. And Jesus, what the people thought of her back in the Doneraile area when they found out—without understanding what sort of place New South Wales was—that she’d married thirty-one hundred and fifty acres!

Tim said nothing now though. He wasn’t going to share his enthusiasms for his sister-in-law with the hawker.

“What she says,” Habash continued, “is that you are generous to a fault. So how fortunate I am that it is you who blocked my path.”

“Don’t expect the bloody advantage of me, Mr. Habab.”

“Not Habab if I dare say so, sir. Habash. My father is Saffy Habash of Forth Street, and I am Saffy Bandy Habash, Bandy to acquaintances. You may know my father.”

“An old feller. On a stick.”

“Yes. On a stick.” Bandy let the wistfulness of that penetrate. “He is indeed our patriarch. Founded our business in the Macleay twenty years ago. Soon after my mother perished, and my father swallowed his grief and kept at work. Now my brother Mouma and myself have taken the load. Mouma does the settlements north to Macksville and south to Kundabung. I take the valley itself from Comara to the New Entrance. We are hawkers and sellers of medicines to every remote acre of the region. We are the servants of the valley and we rarely see each other. From Arakoon and the wives of the prison officers at Trial Bay to far-off Taylor’s Arm. And, of course, to your esteemed sister-in-law at Pee Dee Station.”

“I’ve seen your wagons,” Tim conceded. “Moving about the place.”

“As we all do, I get tired of plodding in a wagon, and I want to gallop like my ancestors in the Punjab, horsemen—if I dare say so—to rival the horsemen of the New South Wales contingent.”

Habash’s grey was still drinking heartily from the trough outside Savage’s two-storey emporium. Habash, admiring it, didn’t move however to take its reins and stop it from gorging on the water. “I paid eleven pounds for it. Its dam is Finisterre, who won the cup at Port Macquarie.”

Tim said, “You wrench the poor beast around a bit for such an expensive one. Why don’t you race it? That would get you out of having to use Belgrave Street as your bloody track.”

“Sir, I was foolish enough to try racing it. But the Kempsey Race Committee pooh-bahs don’t wish to see races run by a hawker’s grey.”

Tim experienced a second’s sympathy for this little Muslim. “The buggers are utter bloody pooh-bahs, you’re right about that.”

“My father says not to waste money on such a thing. And I am an obedient child. That is in our tradition.”

“It’s in every bugger’s tradition,” said Tim, sharply remembering old Jeremiah Shea, his father, left behind childless in another hemisphere. “You don’t have to come from east of Suez to have a tradition like that.”

“But you do not have the honour to have your father with you here in New South Wales,” said Habash.

“That’s exactly right. My father lives in a rainy place called Newmarket. It would take me only two months there and two months back and an expenditure of two hundred pounds to visit him and see if he’s aged. As the poor old feller must have. All his children are in New South Wales or in America. Nothing for them in Newmarket. A small tenant holding. Laughable land. No bloody dignity.”

Habash shook his head and tested his shoulder again. “Life is hard for so many in such a lot of places.”

Jeremiah Shea, a literate Irish farmer who rented fifteen acres from a man named Forester. He did part-time clerking in the town of Newcastle for the Board of Works. Knew his Latin but had nothing to give his children. That was for Jeremiah Shea, pater, the saddest thing. In hic valle lacrimarum. In this vale of tears.

Speaking of Newmarket this way, idly in the Australian dust, revived Tim’s joy in having come here. The heat, the sky, the place: all tokens that he wouldn’t need to leave Johnny and Annie with dismal prospects.

Behind Habash, like a phantom of the sort of orphaned hope Tim had been reflecting on, a small child in a torn white dress staggered around the corner by Worthington’s butchery. Her head twisted back for air, and a keening plea came from her lips. Tim ran to her and Habash collected his grey by the reins and followed. Her sharp little face was red, and she couldn’t understand or tolerate the silent town. Tim rushed up to her and asked her, “What? What, dear?”

“Papa,” she told him, pointing north towards the farms in that direction. Her dress was all marred with red clay. “Papa and Hector. The sulky tipped.”

Her face clenched up. Habash asked, “Where, miss?”

The child said Glenrock near O’Riordan’s, and that was a mile and a half. Tim saw the light in Habash’s eye. The supreme license to gallop.

“Come on, little miss,” Habash cried and fetched the grey and swung the small girl, who may have been ten but was slight for her age, onto the neck of the horse, arranging her sidesaddle, fixing her small hands around the pommel. His own delicate brown hands on the reins would encase her and keep her from falling.

“Go,” said Tim. “I’ll be ten seconds behind.”

He ran down the street and turned into the laneway beyond his store and so to the gate of the paddock where Pee Dee, a bay with white markings, was still grazing and trying to pretend Tim would make no demands. An old Macleay racehorse himself, Pee Dee, a gelding of promise but of erratic temperament. Tim bought him two years ago and had an obstinate affection for the brute. He served Tim and Kitty both as a dray horse and occasionally as a fairly stylish hack. Only four years old, but his previous owner Mr. Milner had given up on him early. Too chancy in behaviour to race. He took to the shafts of the cart with disdain and only after lots of assurance. But he didn’t make quite the same outstanding objection to being ridden. Especially if you did not go to the trouble of bridle and reins and all that leather. Tim took one of the stacked sugar bags from the back verandah, grabbed a rope halter and mouthpiece from the shed, eased himself through the fence and approached Pee Dee with it all.

“Here we go, boy.”

He slung the sugar bag well forward on Pee Dee’s shoulders and worked the rope halter over his head. He led the unwilling and yet strangely tolerant horse to the gate and opened it. Then he took a handful of the beast’s mane with his left hand and clung as best he could to its withers with his right, and so hauled himself onto Pee Dee’s back, stomach first. Leaning low over the horse’s neck and with his arms extended a long way down the beast’s shoulders, he trotted Pee Dee out of the paddock and around the corner of the residence. Hitting Belgrave Street, Pee Dee fell into an apparently eager gait.

“OK,” said Tim leaning forward. “We’ll show that bloody Asiatic something, eh.”

In the street Habash was still waiting, wheeling his horse, impatient as a bloody chasseur of some kind.

But it became apparent as they set out that Habash’s mare was quite clearly tired now from all the racing Bandy had given it, and Pee Dee went frolicking after her, and they rounded the corner by Worthington’s butchery in tight convoy. They galloped leftwards into Forth Street, past the gardens of cottages whose owners were absent, steamer-picnicking townspeople. Pee Dee ahead, as he’d so rarely been on the racecourse, and relishing it. A few dogs chased them. Looking back, Tim saw the little wizened child with the bloody leg and the torn dress leaning back confidingly into Habash. She may even have fallen asleep. Tim felt Pee Dee’s backbone cut into his groin like a blade.

The Macleay River, renowned in its own shire, contained most of the town in a half circle. First, hilly West built up high above its steep-cut bank. Some of the better houses there, and—out beyond the last houses on the hard upriver road to Armidale—the Greenhill blacks’ reservation. Then low Central where the Sheas lived, convenient to wharfs but likely to flood. East then of course lay across the water from Central, reached by punt. Its own place, and not party to the dash Habash and Tim were now engaged on. They were making for the farmlands between West and Central, where the river had flowed earlier in its history and had left some fairly good soil for corn and cane-growing and for dairy cattle. Amongst the country fences and the milking sheds, Pee Dee drew enthusiastically clear of the grey. Mad and unpredictable bugger, he was! Showing the way up past Cochrane Street and over a low hill.

Ahead then you could see something, a terrible mess, a sulky pitched sideways over the edge of the road. Tim had to fight an urge to yank on the reins for fear of nearing the catastrophe on his own and seeing unguessable things. But you could not manage such subtle changes anyhow on Pee Dee and, given the primitive rope halter and reins, it was now a case of bloody Pee Dee surging on, performing well only when it was least suitable.

Thus he was first at the mess. “Oh merciful Jesus!” he said, jumping down, feeling light as a wafer, delivered of his heavy horse.

Seated wailing on the edge of the road, picking up handfuls of gravel and throwing them towards the wreckage down the slope, was a little boy of perhaps four. His targets seemed to be three pigs grazing down there.

Below lay an awfully wounded horse and the ruins of the sulky. One of the shafts had snapped and was stuck deep in the horse’s flank. The beast was writhing very weakly to work the stake loose. Impaled and lying on its side, it looked over its shoulder occasionally to get a glimpse of its injury. The hopeless wound did not invite close consideration and Tim did not give it any. A man in a suit lay on his back. He looked intact, even his clothes looked fresh, but O’Riordan’s three robust pigs were feeding on his head.

Tim slid down the claggy embankment. He did not necessarily want to do it but had to, couldn’t leave it to Habash. White man’s bloody burden in a year already tainted with woman-slaughter.

The poor bastard lay on rain-softened earth and even had a white flower in his buttonhole. Worn but clean white shirt, an eloquent, well-sewn button on the neck. No tie. A cow-cocky coming to town on the holiday. His head had been broken somehow, perhaps by the wheel, and the pigs had come in and eaten at his forehead and his nose. Cruel, cruel bloody world. Beheaded girls, defaced men. Jesus! The gravel thrown by the little boy had no impact at all upon the swine.

Bandy Habash was now descending from his grey, and lifted the small girl down.

Tim began kicking the pigs away. He wished he was armed to state his revulsion with more force. He lifted handfuls of shale to throw at them. But, squealing, they only retreated a certain distance, to see if his passionate objections would last. He felt the man’s wrist with his dusty hands. There seemed to be no life there but how could he tell? Tim’s hands were thickened by the rope reins and his brain clotted with the awfulness.

He heard a huge exhaling, a hiss, a brief gallop of the sulky horse’s breath. Turning, he saw that Habash, bloodied knife in hand, had cut into the side of the horse’s neck and found some decisive vein. Habash stood back delicately to avoid dirtying his boots. From the road, Pee Dee objected loudly to the released smell of horse blood.

“Yes,” Tim said to the hawker. “The right thing.”

The poor horse continued to thrash his legs very feebly but for a few seconds only.

Tim told the hawker, “Go and find one of the doctors.”

Bandy Habash cleaned his knife by plunging it into soft earth. He sighed, “No, old chap. My horse is tired out. You must go with this poor fellow. I shall take the children to your residence, sir, following behind.”

“How can I take him?” asked Tim. “His head such a bloody mess!”

But he knew how already and ran up the muddy slope again to the road.

“Papa, papa?” both the children were asking.

“I’m going to get him, darlings,” said Tim. He took the sugar bag saddle from Pee Dee’s back and descended the slope again with it. He asked Habash to hold the man upright by the shoulders, and then he placed the sugar bag over his head. Together, Habash by the armpits and he by the ankles, they got the man up to the horse while the children wailed.

“Now you know, Mr. Shea,” hissed Habash under the weight, “why we, like the Jews, think pigs unclean. Oh yes, unclean. Over the withers or over the rump?”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “Give me your saddle at least, and I’ll carry him over the shoulders.”

They put the man down for a while and found Pee Dee strangely tractable while the saddle was swapped and the girth adjusted. Kitty always said the horse was human. Then the man was lifted and balanced over Pee Dee’s very broad withers. The bag, despite the amounts of muck which affixed it in place, threatened to fall off his head. Habash produced string and tied it loosely around the man’s neck.

“I don’t think he’ll smother, poor fellow,” said Tim, fighting the shudders.

“Mr. Shea,” said Habash, straightening. “The man is quite dead. God has received his soul.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Tim. “But we’ll see.”

He could afford no more than a second to steel himself for sharing the horse with the man almost certainly gone. Then he got up decisively into the saddle. It felt unbalanced to have a fine saddle and rope reins, and between those two the lean man. But no delay to be permitted. He kicked Pee Dee’s flanks and made decent progress towards town. The man pressed back against his thighs like a living thing.

What doctor? Dr. Erson was singing operetta on the Terara. Dr. Casement, he knew from a notice in the Argus, had taken Keogh’s coach to the beaches of Port Macquarie. Dr. Gabriel was perhaps at home across the river in East, and it would be a nightmare waiting for the punt to come across. It was therefore a matter of the district hospital.

Pee Dee kept up a surprisingly brave canter towards town. You could go on the better roads through West, or more directly over the bush tracks towards the hospital. Through West was the supposedly civilised way, but there would be a few people around the shooting gallery beside the Post Office. Yahoos who couldn’t afford the boat fare or who thought such normal country diversions beneath them.

“What do you have there, Tim?” they would call, and the damaged man deserved better, both softer and more urgent enquiries. The Armenian who ran the eyesore of a shooting gallery would grin out from under the shade of the awning and hand one of the would-be Macleay sharpshooters a rifle loaded with pellets.

These sorts of possibilities steered Tim right, along the bush tracks across country to the hill above West Kempsey and the hospital.

“Quick along,” Tim kept urging Pee Dee. He was a much better mount than he was a carthorse, the mad bugger.

The path took him through humid, fly-ridden bush and past the Warwick racecourse the Race Club wouldn’t admit Habash to. Heat was pretty dense under these scraggy gumtrees. At last the Macleay could be seen ahead, broad and set low in a wide bed. The heedless river was a pathetic blue here.

“Look, look,” said Tim to the jolting man. “Did you come to town for a holiday? Look, look, you poor feller.”

Pee Dee, just to be unpredictable, still trotted briskly as they entered the hospital driveway and stopped by the large Morton Bay fig tree. Tim tethered him to the hospital railing. On the verandah, he noticed, a frail child in a nightdress sat in a big wicker chair. Beginning to weep, Tim eased the man down by the shoulders, the feet being the last heavily to flop off Pee Dee’s neck, but both boots staying on—for which Tim was somehow grateful. Tim laid the man in the shade of the verandah and ran inside. A pleasant-faced, full-breasted nurse saw him and cried, “Yes?”

It was the long dusk. In the cookhouse at the back of the store, he lit the range and the heat it gave off reacted more pleasantly than you’d expect on the warmth trapped in the room. Sweating, he made tea and slabs of white bread and honey for the little girl who waited inside in the dining room and whose brother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the drawing room.

This will be an awful year, he knew in spite of knowing better. The omens were so terrible. He shook his head, not wanting to think that way. Wanting to think like a modern fellow, not a bloody peasant. But this will be an awful year.

When he brought the food and drink to the girl, she seemed lost at the head of the table in his large-backed chair. He had earlier bathed her leg with iodine, and this little ritual against sepsis had done them both some good, making her cry out in a plain iodine anguish, proving to him that there were still simple human services to be supplied.

It occurred to Tim now and then that her father was in the room of the dead in the hospital above the river in West, keeping company with a thirteen-year-old boy from Collombattye who had perished from lockjaw. Tim had helped the nurses place him there after they had washed the corpse.

This awareness of her father’s location seemed to overtake the small girl too, because sometimes she would put her bread down, appetite fled, and weep purely and privately like a brave grown woman.

She was an orphan now. Her name was Lucy Rochester. Her sleeping brother was Hector. Her father was or had been Albert. Tim knew him—he’d sometimes come into the store on Friday afternoons. A good type. The industrious cow-cocky who rises at four for milking and ends his days in terrible muteness. His children with him milking through every dawn of his life. You could tell it from Lucy Rochester’s hands as they held the bread. They were creased from the milking, the butter churn, and from cranking the chaff-cutter. And then, no doubt, her feet hardened by walking into school from Glenrock. Falling asleep in the mathematics class. Smartalec children from town laughing at that. He knew what she didn’t. The history of her hard little hands. In the Old Testament-style flood of ’92, the maize crops had been wiped out when the water swept over the lowlands and lapped against that embankment where Mr. Albert Rochester had this morning suffered his accident. Great hardships at that time. Farms going broke. The prices of produce in Sussex Street, Sydney’s bourse of all farm products, being squeezed and squeezed. And authoritative men from the New South Wales Agriculture Department and all manner of dairy enthusiasts, some of them from Sydney University, had come and delivered the dairy message. The Jersey cow. Unlike the maize crops, it could walk to high ground in time of flood, and the dumped mud from upriver would soon be fertilised and would feed herds in coming seasons.

And yet now men were enslaved to the dairy farms, and their women were taken by chills in the predawn, and their children grew hard-handed and sleepy and thus ignorant. He would not be a dairy farmer unless, like the Burkes of Pee Dee, he could hire hands to do the dawn milking.

In the Macleay, men like Rochester were owned by their Jersey cattle.

“Why were you coming to town?” Tim asked the child.

“Seeing Mrs. Sutter,” said the little girl. She had a strange grown way of addressing him. People spoke of little women. She was one. “Mama’s best friend, Mrs. Sutter. We would stay till night. Papa got the Coleman boys to do the afternoon milking.”

A cow-cocky’s holiday, and he’s killed while it’s all still in anticipation! Was Mrs. Sutter to be the second Mrs. Rochester?

The glass in the store door was being rattled.

He went through the living room, past the sleeping boy. Through a tasselled doorway. The shop was full of its pent-up special smell today, a smell of tin and tea, sugar and sisal, candles and methylated spirits. A slight honeying of the air from the cans of treacle resting on the shelves. A hint of shortbread, a manly reek of kerosene. Goods supplied to him on two months’ credit, unlike the three months’ credit he gave his best clients, the Malcolms say and, of course, Old Burke from up the river. And how could you dun a nice man like the Offhand, who needed his scribe’s salary to pay for his habits? Miss Myra Howard’s theatrical company had run up a bill during their stay at the Commercial, tinned sausages and peas, tea and lemonade. That bill six months unpaid. Miss Howard’s agent in Sydney said that he would draw it to her attention as soon as she returned to Sydney from a tour of Far North Queensland at the end of the summer. As a result of such experiences, he no longer looked at the shelves with the undoubting sense of ownership which had, until recently, been one of his vanities.

Rangy Constable Hanney was rattling the glass. He’d tied up his horse and trap to one of the posts which held up the awning of T. Shea—General Store.

When Tim opened the door, the constable stepped straight in; a matter of habit. His hat was off, his brushy hair glittering with sweat.

“I thought you were on Terara,” said Tim. Don’t let him show me the murdered girl’s face, on top of everything else!

“No. Sergeants go off on steamers. Mug coppers stay at home. Got to get that statement from you, Shea. You have the children? Good. I need to talk to the girl. Poor bastard. Might have got his leg over with Mrs. Sutter. Not now though.”

Tim led him into the dining room. The girl put her bread down and observed the policeman.

“Oh dearie,” said Constable Hanney. “Dr. Gabriel says your papa died straight off. He did not feel any of the pigs. In heaven he’s got everything.” Hanney made a sort of inventory with his fingers of his own forehead, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks. “Your papa is a glorious young fellow in heaven.”

She opened her mouth but did not weep. She rubbed her jaw with her seamed little hand.

She said, “The horse shied at a heap of gravel. Hector fell out when the wheel went off the edge. My dress got caught on the footboard and I cut my leg. Papa fell too. I saw the wheel go over his head.”

Hanney took notes and questioned Tim, who felt grateful for the constable’s official compassion.

The child had gone back to her bread. Hanney and Tim could have been speaking of a separate tragedy from hers.

Hanney said at the end, “You should see if Mrs. Sutter will take them. She’s got an income, you know. Her husband left her land upriver, and she sold it and lives off the interest. She and Rochester spoke of buying a pub somewhere, Kew I think, by the bridge there. We have not here a lasting bloody city, eh. Did that bloody ruffian Habash behave himself?”

“He behaved well,” said Tim at once. “He fixed up Rochester’s horse very humanely. Then brought the children here while I took the father…”

Why such a defence of the hawker? he asked himself. The bugger had flogged the grey. Yet Tim didn’t want him punished for that any more. The horror of the forenoon had been enough punishment.

“You couldn’t have the kids go with him,” said Hanney. “Not into a Mohammedan household. Do you have any brandy?”

Tim admitted he did.

“What if you get one for yourself and one for me?”

“Do you think I need it? I don’t think I need it.”

This request for a stimulant was faintly surprising to Tim. Hanney did not look like a cadger of drinks. He lowered his voice. “I brought the young woman with me. Saves me coming back tomorrow.”

“Oh God,” said Tim, getting up. He went and took the Old Toby brandy out of the encyclopedia bookcase in the living room. He poured two hefty glassfuls.

“Whoa!” cried Constable Hanney, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a head for liquor.”

The little girl had finished eating and had folded her arms. “To your papa,” Hanney told her, hitching his glass up and beginning to sip. The child watched him with indifference or lack of forgiveness.

“Yes,” was all Tim could think to say. He drank in uneven gulps. He did not savour it like Hanney did. He noticed though, as the liquor went trembling through him, that his fever was gone.

“But you didn’t know him,” said the girl evenly.

Hanney half-smiled but Tim thought Lucy Rochester should be answered. “We know you and Hector,” he said. “We feel for you.”

He put his glass down and went and got a bound volume of the Sydney Mail of ten years past out of the front room. He brought it back in to Lucy Rochester.

“You might find that interesting to look through,” he said. She began to do it. With her yellowed, seamy, little fingers.

In front of Tim, Hanney walked a bit unsteadily but like a man mellowed. Out through the store, opening the front door for himself. The day had settled sweetly and thickly in Belgrave and Smith Streets, and there was a hint of blueness, of the advancing satin of the wide-open night. The populous frogs of the Macleay had already started up.

Hanney inexactly gestured him around to the passenger side of the trap. A fruit basket lay under the seat there, holding something wrapped in blue and white cloth.

“All right then!” he said, closing his eyes for a second and shaking his head. “This is the woman they found in the bootbox washed up at Sherwood.”

“I know, I know,” said Tim.

“We call her Missy. She was only young. Just go easy with it, Shea. You’ll see, she was lovely in life.”

The empty town’s air spoke of all the lovely dead, including Mr. Albert Rochester who showed his young man’s face forth now only in heaven. Tim gripped one of the handlebars on the trap and Hanney dragged the basket forth and lifted the cloth. Inside was a huge preserving jar. Hanney raised it with care, his great hand with fist and fingers spread wide to keep it steady.

The head of a girl of perhaps twenty years sat crookedly in there. How piteous that crookedness, as if the surgeon hadn’t taken enough pains. Barely a complaint on that face, the eyes nearly shut, the lips of what had been a small mouth slightly parted. The docked but trailing hair was light brown. No shallow, no vulgar plea there, in the way she presented herself. This was a serious child, making serious claims. Tim felt them at first sight.

“Nothing but heads today,” he said in confusion. “Bert’s and hers.”

“Steady, old chap,” said Hanney, who didn’t seem steady himself. “Someone must know her. She must have a mother or father somewhere. Or of more interest to me, she’s got to have had a lover. Probably here—I bet she got Mrs. Mulroney’s name from him. He could settle the matter. Then she wouldn’t need to be called Unnamed Female in court.”

No question this was at once the chief question. Bigger than raising regiments. The girl or young woman not to be Unnamed Female. Her unnamed state was the shadow over things. The shadow over him.

Tim swallowed and looked away at the violet evening settling on the river. So bloody hard to make any easy connection between the dusk splendour and that face separated from its heart.

“See I thought she might’ve made a purchase, Shea. The day it happened. She may have had a craving say. Wanted chocolate. Have a good look.”

Tim drew his eyes down again from the lavender southeast, the bluest quarter of the evening, and took a further stare. The demand on him was still there behind the lowered lids. And why not? Such useless and terrible beauty, beauty lopped from its roots. And in new and desperate alliance with him. Begging for the mercy of an identification. Aching for his word. “Yes, I did see her.” Or the supremely exorcising sentence, “Yes, that’s…” Waiting to be liberated from the constable’s fluid.

Tim would have made a name up right then if it could have helped her.

Hanney said, “Showed her to Captain Reid of the Burrawong, but he swore she hadn’t travelled with him. I showed it to the people at Keogh’s and Naylor’s coaches, thinking she might have come into town on them.”

Hanney staring at him. Was this stare totally kind?

Tim said, “Never seen her. I wish I could put a name to her. I’d be very damn happy to.”

Hanney took the flask into the crook of his right arm and whacked his police trousers sharply with his left hand. He still looked calm enough though.

“Bloody all beats me,” said Hanney. “If we can’t identify her here, I’ll have to go on the road with her.”

“For God’s sake,” Tim asked, “why in the age of the photograph wasn’t a picture taken?”

“There was one. And a sketch. But the Commissioner in Sydney says nothing has ever worked like this method. Pierces the imagination, see. Gingers up the memory. It’s an old Scottish method.”

“Holy bloody hell,” said Tim.

Hanney had at last covered the jar again, returned it to the basket, said good afternoon without any discernible disappointment, climbed shakily aboard and rode away. Tim knew at once that in sleep his vacant brain would be taken up with the features of the mute, dissected woman.

Still no sign of the Terara downriver. A long, long, long way to the New Entrance which the river had found for itself in the awful flood of eight years past.

Entertaining the orphans in these waiting, intervening hours seemed such a huge ordeal. Back through the store, he turned his eyes from the jars on the higher shelves, the bland faces of peaches and pears. In the dining room he told the girl, “A bit later, we’ll go to Mrs. Sutter’s when I have Pee Dee in his traces.” She looked up briefly and returned her head to the page. Wanting to know what had her engrossed, Tim stepped around the table and looked over her bony shoulder.

It was an engraving marked, View of the Kimberley Goldfields, Cape Colony, Southern Africa.

“You look at that then,” he advised her, and decided he must not seem to be rushing the orphans to their father’s woman friend, particularly not now, at this most threatening time, as the light faded.

From the meat safe on the back verandah he took two pounds of Knauer’s sausages bought fresh a few days before, and in the hot cookhouse re-kindled the fire and began to cook them up with potatoes and sliced onion in a huge frying pan.

When they were fully cooked, he took them inside and dished out a plateful to the girl. She watched him.

“If papa and Hector and I were in a sulky in South Africa,” she asked him, not like a trick question, “would it’ve all fallen over like that?”

Unanswerable questions from Missy and now from the waif!

“Sad thing is,” he told her, “we are where we are.”

He put a hand on her wrist, to still her mind. Then he woke the little boy and took him to the outhouse, waiting in the stillness until he was done. Back at the table, Hector ate fitfully, not speaking at all however of his horrible morning. The girl proved a ferocious eater of her tea. Stick-thin but a real forager.

“Hold hard, Lucy,” he laughed, reloading her plate, refilling her tea cup. Sugar very good for grief. He shovelled four spoonfuls into her cup. She looked up at him without a smile, planting on him his part of the blame for Albert Rochester and his children being here and not in some level place in Africa.

Unlike his industrious diner of a sister, the boy had sat back after devouring half a snag and seemed to be taking pretty judicious thought about his future. Almost for his own comfort, Tim lit a kerosene lamp on the first evening of their fatherlessness.

Crickets had set up madly in the paddock. The evening full of frog-thunder and insect-chirping, and he began to feel orphaned himself.

“Are you tired?” he asked the boy hopefully. But the boy did not answer, and the girl still had her mind on Africa.

The hoot of the river boat Terara was at last heard. No august hoot, like that of the Burrawong. No memory of New South Wales’s long coastline in its bleat. Slower than a cripple, it was bearing Kitty home.

“Do you want to see the Terara come in?” Tim asked the children, and they immediately slipped from their chairs as if they’d been threatened, and stood ready to go. He must have been pretty good at getting orders obeyed, poor Albert Rochester.

Tim got his coat and old brown hat off a peg on the wall, and led the children through the shop and out beneath the awning, across the neck of Belgrave Street whose dust had got a churning from the hawker and his grey, and down Smith Street past the Greek cafe and so to the landing. Missy and the day’s tragedy receded a little. For a while all felt restored to him. A man in an average season. Across the kindly waters he could hear the picnickers, the returning townspeople, all talking at once.

“See!” he told the orphans. “Mrs. Shea and Johnny and Annie are on that ship.”

He saw his lanky six-and-a-half-year-old son Johnny hanging over the gunwales. Just his arms and shoulders and head. Unruly little bugger! And Kitty and sedate little Annie waiting on the edge of the ruck of would-be disembarkers. Kitty with veil up and basket in hand. From this distance, she looked somehow more pregnant than when she had left that morning. Not possible, of course. Just that you did not often see your wife distanced in this way. Separated by elements. You on earth. She on water.

The black flank of Terara touched the great hempen buffers on the wharf, gates opened amidships and the gangplank came down. People streamed down it pretty much in order of social eminence. Dr. Erson with his lush theatrical moustache, his thin wife. Mr. Chance, the natty livestock and property agent, his musical daughter…

Here were men Tim envied not for their better income but for being at home in the world. No sense of being exiled at all. Erson one of them. Reputed to be the best doctor in the Macleay, though some swore by Doctors Gabriel and Casement. Which of them had separated Missy from her body though?

Women and children milling on deck to descend. Couldn’t wait for land after the slow steamer excursion. His wife among them. He felt calmer to watch her, she looked in such control. There should be at least one of those in every family. Someone anchored. Hanney’s woman in the jar would be more apprised of all this next time around. She would play things safe and cosy and join the Macleay Valley Theatrical and Operatic Society.

Some of those descending the gangplank with their mild, dazed picnickers’ smiles halted for a second wondering what Mr. Tim Shea was doing there with children not his own. Mr. Sheridan the solicitor and his wife. Sheridan very much the young statesman and destined for politics, one or other of the two Parliaments which would soon be available, the parliament of Australia-wide or the old parliament of New South Wales.

Then the accountant Mr. Malcolm, a beefy man, very jovial, representing earth, and his lovely dark-haired ivory-skinned wife. Slender and—for a woman—tall, Mrs. Malcolm. White dress, huge pink hat with a rucked-up veil. She was his finest customer, the only one who occasionally used couplets of Tennyson while buying groceries. But not in a flashy way. As naturally as breathing. Poetry the mist from a noble soul.

Once when dropping off an order in the store, a few young men on horseback had ridden wildly by, yahooing and being fools. A look of genuine defeat crossed Winnie Malcolm’s face and one drop of sweat made its way from the direction of her ear down her cheek. Tim had felt a burning pity for her at that second. But she gathered herself and wiped the sweat with a handkerchief.

“We have to remember, Mr. Shea, that the Saxons themselves were once unruly tribes. Australia will one day become something more august.”

Did she hope the same thing about Ernie, who was so fortunate to have such a jewel yet didn’t seem overwhelmed by his luck? She stopped by Tim and her husband waited there too, with his blowsy holiday grin fixed in place and some kind of cheroot carried negligently in the corner of his gob. A customer of T. Shea—General Store, Belgrave Street, Kempsey. He had drunk a lot, judging from his hoppy smell, and he was on his way home to eat and drink more, and then he’d probably want to jump on the divine Mrs. Malcolm. Lucky, lucky bugger! On top of everything, he didn’t know that the very air had been mortgaged to Missy, to naming Missy, to giving her rest. And that would be the rape of spirit by flesh, yet Mrs. Malcolm didn’t seem fearful. Her upper lip formed its delicate bow while the lower kept its place, glossy and static.

Native-born Australians were like that. Never used both lips at once. He was beginning to see it this early in his children, and it was there in the little Rochester girl and helped make her sentences like those of a sleepwalker.

“What children are these, Tim?”

“They’re the Rochester children, Mrs. Malcolm.”

Here in sight of Kitty and his own children, he kept a curb on his pleasure in Mrs. Malcolm’s normal sentences. And as if to show all was fair and above board, he turned to bovine Mr. Ernie Malcolm. What a bush aristocrat! Yet he stood just behind M. M. Chance as a leader of the community.

“They’re Mr. Albert Rochester’s children,” said Tim. “Poor feller had an accident this morning.”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Malcolm. She had noble, long features. “Where is he put…?”

“It was a mortal accident, Mrs. Malcolm.”

Mrs. Malcolm looked at the small, level-gazing Rochester girl who stared so judiciously back at her that now she had to fling her eyes to the sky and say, “Poor darlings.”

“Here,” said Mr. Malcolm. He didn’t have any sense that this little kid expected him to help her lift the whole disaster to another continent, and then smooth over any tears in the fabrics of place and of time. He kept the cigarette-ish thing in the bunched corner of his mouth as he threw his head back too and began fumbling in the pockets of his vest. He took out two shillings, and offered one in his left hand and one in his right to each of the Rochester children. He did it too as if this were the spacious limit of his charity.

The children frowned at him. So Malcolm reached down now and opened Hector’s hand and put the shilling in there and closed the fingers for him, and then he did the same with Lucy’s small, grained hand. He was pretty pleased with himself. He was their gift-horse.

“His head was broken,” Tim whispered to Mrs. Malcolm. “An accident on the road.”

“Dear God!” she said in a low voice back. “Let me know if there is anything I can do…”

Was this a token offer? Tim wondered. Tim didn’t like the way, dragging his wife, Mr. Malcolm moved off as soon as Kitty arrived on the wharf. Was she a person beneath his bloody attention?

“Hello there,” cried Kitty. Her long mouth split in the plainest and most personable of smiles. How could a fellow not like women with their kindnesses so varied?

“Good evening to you, Mrs. Malcolm,” she called after the Malcolms, and winked at Tim.

Mrs. Malcolm said over her shoulder almost nervously, “Yes, Mrs. Shea, we met in the store. Didn’t we?”

And Kitty murmured, “We did, and is that the reason you’re disappearing like a rat down a drain now?”

How hard his daughter Annie stared at the Rochester child. Tim nudged her round cheek with a knuckle. “Come on, Duchess. Don’t be grim.”

Kitty said, “She did ask me from the very deck what is papa doing with those children?”

A trace of chastisement in Kitty’s voice. As if she thought he’d wilfully gone out and collected two children.

Tim, inhibited by the listening Rochester children, gave a brief summary of the disaster.

“Their horse dragged their sulky off the edge at O’Riordan’s at Glenrock this morning. Their father Albert Rochester is finished. These infants are on their own now.”

“Then come, come,” said Kitty when he finished. “Let’s feed you all.”

“Done already,” he told her with the small pride of a male who manages to put a meal together.

Johnny performed a cartwheel on the splintery boards of Central landing to show Lucy Rochester it was possible.

Tipsy excursionists, having crossed the wharf, were struggling now up the ramp to Smith Street and getting up on their parked sulkies and carts. Mr. Malcolm, by now having helped his wife into their trap, unhitched his horse and took some heaving to get himself up. He shook out the reins energetically.

“I hope the horse is soberer than he is,” Kitty told Tim. “What’s to do with these waifs would you say, Tim?”

“Careful now,” Tim called to Johnny, who was running into Smith Street and its backing carts and its resentful bucking horses. “Careful there, John.”

For Johnny had a crazy look in his eye, put there by meeting another child and recognising some answering lunacy there. Soulmates, it seemed. And the steamer trip hadn’t taken all the ginger and stampede out of the boy.

As they walked along, Smith Street cleared though the dust of others hung still in the air. Old Tapley, who was believed to have once been a London pickpocket and to have been sent to Port Macquarie for it in those days, puttered out of Belgrave Street with his little ladder and his tapers and began lighting up the lamps in front of the draper’s, on a slant across from T. Shea—General Store.

Kitty said, “You did not have your day of solitude then?”

“No chance.”

He felt restored though for the moment. He had that wonderful feeling of being married, and of heading home to a place marked with his name in blue and yellow. He took Kitty’s basket, and in reaching across her to do it, picked up the malty aroma of stout she gave off. Recommended for Carrying and Nursing Mothers.

When Tim took the basket, letting go of Hector’s hand, Hector immediately walked around and claimed Kitty’s right hand.

“There you are, darling,” she told him.

But it sounded a little brisk and offhand to Tim. She didn’t want to make any promises.

She said, “I’ve been choosing the moment to tell you. I had a letter from the last visit of Burrawong. My young sister Mamie has already arranged to come here and has been accepted by New South Wales. You’d think the bloody Macleay was the centre of the universe, wouldn’t you?”

“Jesus!” said Tim.

“Thought you’d say that.” She’d left the “h” out of words as everyone did in the part of North Cork they came from. He’d tried to put it into his diction, since that lost “h” was something the bigots used to beat you on the head with, or at least to justify derision. Kitty however was never going to try. He’d both admired and regretted her for that.

“I’ve only known myself about Mamie since Thursday,” she said. “The awful little tart didn’t even tell me. Presumed! Presumed we’re always open for emigrants. Since last Thursday is all I knew!”

Which she’d pronounced now and ever would, Tursdy.

“Don’t get cranky, Tim,” she pleaded.

Old Red Kenna, a little rooster of a man, had begotten eleven children along the lines of Kitty. They were a raucous mob. And very earthy. Were they going to come to the Macleay one by one, the arrival of the next one all the more guaranteed by the success of the last? Australia as famous as New York at Red Kenna’s hearth and in that corner of North Cork. The same story had already happened in another direction with Tim’s own more sedate clan. His eldest sister had gone to Brooklyn and married a newspaper editor—married the Brooklyn Advocate, in fact. And so, one by one, two others of his older sisters had crossed the Atlantic on the strength of that founding bit of emigrant luck. One of these follow-the-leader sisters was now a housekeeper to a family of Jewish haberdashers, the other had married a stevedore. He, Tim, had been expected to join his sister in Brooklyn, his important sister, the newspaper editor’s wife. From the age of sixteen he’d always said in public that he would, and yet knew in his water he was lying. In the Cork papers were weekly advertisements saying, Attractive Terms of Emigration to New South Wales.

Of course, no one really understood what distances were involved. You could return from Brooklyn. The emigrant’s return was one of the staple bright hopes of all parties. But who could return from New South Wales?

The thing was the idea of being on his own, away from the maternal manners of sisters. That interested him more than he could properly utter even to himself. And now, what Brooklyn was to the Sheas, his own little store in Belgrave Street was to Red Kenna’s squat, charming children.

Kitty said, “You can’t beat Mamie. Went all the way to the Agent-General in the Strand to get a special rate. Imagine!”

“And we’ll put Mamie on the verandah like Molly?” asked Tim.

“Out there under a mosquito net while the summer lasts. She should be settled in somewhere by winter. She makes her way, that one. Not at all shy like me!”

“No room in the inn then for some small people,” murmured Tim.

Annie was working herself in between the two of them from behind, saying, “Mama, mama.”

“You’d think those Rochester children had friends and relatives, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, we surely bloody well do,” said Tim.

She dug him with her elbow. “Don’t get sullen there, Tim.”

He flinched. “I saw Hanney’s woman too.”

“Holy God, the little woman they murdered. Did you? Could you see her features and everything else?”

“You could.”

“Anyone we know, would you say?”

“No one. No one.”

“Mama, mama,” yelled Annie.

“She’s such a jealous little creature,” said Kitty.

Jealous little creature. Missy the true jealous little creature. Resenting his idle hours, hanging on his shoulders, pending on all events. Wanting her name back.

“Let me alone,” he muttered.

“What did you say?” asked Kitty. But idly. She did not demand an answer.