A River Town

Two

BEFORE YOU WENT to the trouble of putting a collar on Pee Dee and harnessing him up, it was best to check the Argus to see if any circuses or any large herds of cattle were due to come down Belgrave Street. He didn’t even like the teams of bullocks which brought the big cedars down to the timber mill. He would back in the traces, pigroot, buck.

There were no circuses on the morning after the holiday, however. No reason to delay taking the Rochester children up to Mrs. Sutter’s house by the showground.

The Macleay so flood-prone that everyone thought of the Showground Hill primarily as “above flood level.” Tim’s place was not. In still hours when he woke, he asked himself about the wisdom of living as close to the spirited Macleay River as he did. Flood eight years past had drowned Belgrave Street to the awnings and filled the stores with mud. Tight as a bloody nougat. He knew because he’d helped old Carlton shovel mud out of what was now his place. In those days, he’d not been a shopkeeper but—after working three years for Kiley’s haulage—had hopes of the Jerseyville pub. He’d shovelled up the mud and heard Carlton complain. Tim in the last of his four years of bachelorhood in New South Wales. He wanted the license to the Jerseyville pub, but the pub didn’t eventuate—Kitty could not reach New South Wales to marry him in time. Just the same, looking to get into business, and flood was a good season to begin, to trade on Carlton’s weariness, to write to the wholesalers in Sydney, sending along your references.

That flood had been a flood out of a prophecy. A chastisement unlikely to recur. So forceful that the river found a new way into the sea near Trial Bay. The New Entrance. Such had been the vigour of the Macleay. It had negotiated a new arrangement, dictating terms of its own with the Pacific Ocean. Kitty, arriving later, didn’t understand how bloody strenuous the huge event had been. “Flood, flood,” she’d complained. “All you hear on every side is flood.”

For she hadn’t seen the way young Wooderson and he rowed out from their moorage, which happened to be the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel, to rescue the Kerridges from the roof of their house in Elbow Street. The current terrible to push against, and on the way back with Kerridge and his wife and two children, they’d seen a chest of drawers sail past. Wooderson, being such a good swimmer, had actually got into the flood and attached a rope to it, and the flow of water had swept it and the boat and them back to the Commercial.

In case the Book of Floods Part Two struck Kempsey, he had acquired a rowboat, in which he sometimes took the children out on the river. When not so used, it was kept tethered on a long lead, like a goat, in the yard. A prayer against further floods. A child, he knew, was a wafer before the force of the water. And Lucy, the wafer of a child beside him, had been through that, would have been an infant in Glenrock, would have been taken onto the iron roof by her mother and father to wait things out. The range of perils which surrounded young flesh. This was what astounded Tim more than he could ever express.

He hoped she still wasn’t pushing Africa round in her head: the possible locale where Albert Rochester might have been safe.

“Do you like Mrs. Sutter’s place?” he asked.

As ever, she answered in the way she chose. “Mrs. Sutter was mama’s and papa’s best friend of all.”

For relief from the features of Hanney’s Missy, he’d happily clung to Kitty last night, but it had been so hot she did not welcome that. For some hours before going to bed, he had known that once he put his head on the pillow and turned the wick down on the storm lantern, he would feel lost in a particular way. And it had happened. He had felt too nakedly what he was: the lost man on the furtherest river bank of the remotest province. But terrible to apprehend it, awful to feel wadded away under distance. A sort of—what was it?—twelve or thirteen thousand mile high column of distance under which he had managed to pin himself.

Now poor Rochester could nearly be safely thought of in the dark. In this sense: Rochester lived, Rochester perished in a fall from his sulky and while insensible was attacked by beasts. It was different with the girl who’d been cut about by someone who could smile. She was dreadfully everywhere, a face begging its name back.

Predictable dreams of her followed, of course, and their pungency remained by daylight and flavoured the act of getting rid of Lucy.

On the tranquil hill, Mrs. Sutter the widow had two gates, one canopied, and another one at the side marked TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. Her late husband himself probably put it there. So much nonsense under the gumtrees. A gate for the afternoon tea gentry to enter, and a gate for others to deliver wood and ice and groceries.

You’d think by that label on the gate that beyond Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow lay hundreds of villagers, dozens of tenant-farmers. And in Kempsey the main gate and tradesmen’s gate lay within a short spit of each other. He was buggered if he was going to take Mrs. Sutter’s suitor’s orphans in by the side gate.

Palm off Lucy and Hector to make a place for Kitty’s sister. Kitty would have had to have nominated her. A form would have come from the New South Wales Department of Immigration, and she would have needed to sign it. But it had taken the sudden arrival of orphans to make her mention it. Jesus, the slyness!

And at the moment he seemed to get, from the direction of Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow, a whiff of slyness too. Widowed once, she had now been widowed in a certain sense again. She’d had none of the joy of drinking tea with, none of the secure married talk with poor Rochester. But now she would be offered his children.

He heard the noise of her children inside now, and holding the little boy’s hand, he knocked on the yellow front door with its panels of pebbled glass. No one came for some time, and then a boy of about eleven opened the door, grabbed the Rochester children in by the hand and told Tim, “Mama’s round the back.” The door was closed in his face. Tim went around the flank of the yellow house. You could smell the hot, moist odour of the spaces under the house. The Sutter residence had the honour of standing on brick piers. The idea of air circulating beneath the floor had seemed an odd one to him when he first arrived. On top of the moist earth smell there was a tang of sweet corruption from the garbage tip of the yard, but between him and that rankness lay the smell and then the sight of soap-cleansed sheets blowing on a breeze.

A woman wore boots amongst the great flags of bedclothing. Mrs. Sutter, dark-haired and tall, narrow in the shoulders, well-set in the hips. An occasional customer of his. A lot of people worked on the principle of spreading custom around, because you never knew when you’d need to spread your debts out a bit as well.

She came forward to him, her hands out, pallid from the soap and water.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you were so brave, Mr. Shea.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“You relieved poor Bert’s last moments, a friendly face bending over him. Constable Hanney told me.”

She began to weep. She smoothed her tears sideways with big, lovely, soapy hands.

“There was another man there,” said Tim.

“Yes, the hawker. God Almighty, that wouldn’t have been a particular comfort to Bert.”

He found himself in defence of Bandy Habash. “He behaved very, very well, Mrs. Sutter.” For one damn thing, he dealt with the horse who would have still been thrashing and heaving out there if he hadn’t. “He’s not a bad little chap.”

“Yes, but I know that you directed the rescue,” she said.

She didn’t know what a pitiable state Bert had been in. Bert in his ending needed the help of all parties.

Tim said, “I brought his two children with me. Both of them are indoors with yours. The girl Lucy. More presence than a judge, that Lucy. And then the poor little boy.”

He saw tall Mrs. Sutter, whose face poor de-faced Rochester had dwelt on, look away. He knew it was bad news. It astounded him the way women could set limits. The mothers and the motherers, and yet they always had definite ideas about what could be done with ease, and what the boundaries of content were.

Mrs. Sutter inhaled and was gathering herself for an answer when three or four children burst from the back steps. A boy, three girls and the children with whom he was now as familiar as if they had emigrated with him. Lucy, Hector. The oldest Sutter boy had proposed some sort of roughhouse, some racing around. Lucy stood back, weighing what it meant. Sharp-featured and calm. What a daughter! She did not blunder into things like the boy Hector. Every course she took a chosen one.

They all went shrilling off around the side of the house towards the front. Towards the Tradesmen’s Entrance. Lucy ran behind them, inspecting the Sutter yard as if she’d never seen it before.

Mrs. Sutter took a pair of child’s bloomers out of a basket, pegged them to the line, but then seemed to need to hang on to them for a sort of support. She stared very hard at the wet fabric.

“I’ll take the boy. But Bert wouldn’t have expected me to take the girl. She hates me. I’ve got no affection for her.”

“Is there someone else then?” asked Tim. “Who can take her? I have a third child on its way, and then my sister-in-law is emigrating, due here on the Aberdeen Line…”

“There’s no one else I can think of. I wondered would the nuns take her? Get somewhere with her? You know the nuns, don’t you? Wonderful music-teachers.”

He waited for her to say she could help with the expense. He was damned if he would mention it and draw her grudgingly into some undertaking. She let go of the bloomers and stood up and looked at him directly.

“She was the problem with Bert and me. She didn’t like me and did brutal things to the other children. Just to keep me in my place. She’s a brutal little thing.”

“I hadn’t noticed that.”

Mrs. Sutter looked away across her well-ordered backyard. Her garbage heap far off at the back fence. Her woodheap in order against the side fence. You could bet Bert had cut the wood and stacked it for her a week back, on some visit. The palpable benefits of marriage. Stacked wood, cut in regular sizes. A mound of kindling and a tidy little wall of split softwood. Tears appeared on Mrs. Sutter’s long lashes.

“But for her I would have been widowed twice, I suppose. I can’t live with her. Take her to the nuns. She is a destroying little soul. You’d think they would extend their charity to her and do her some benefit. I’m sorry about all this when you’ve already been so good…”

But however sorry she might be, Mrs. Sutter was implacable. She went on pegging her clothes.

“It occurred to me though,” said Tim. “Whether you’d buy the farm.”

“Oh no. No, there’s nothing for me in the farm. There’s something for the bank.”

Five minutes later, out the front by Tim’s wagon, the two Rochester children were making a supervised farewell to each other.

Hector cried, but Mrs. Sutter’s son and four girls began to distract him. Mrs. Sutter herself issued formal instructions from a distance. “Kiss good-bye to your sister now.”

Tim began offering Lucy consideration. “I’ll bring you to see him on the weekends.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Sutter. “Perhaps for tea on Sundays.”

Limited to such a small set of future reunions, Lucy gave her tear-stained brother an embrace more muscular than emotional. It was a hug which carried a sort of promise of return in it. Lucy climbed up into the cart without being asked to—she seemed to be too proud to face being directed as her brother had. Tim took the reins and turned Pee Dee’s head. Rolling downhill at last from Hector’s sadness, he could hear the widow and her children kindly turning young Hector’s attention to the Sutters’ aged dog.

“Well,” Tim said, shaking Pee Dee into a trot. “Your brother has a good billet there, eh. For you we might need to see the nuns. It’s good there I hear. Girls the one age as you. In from the farms. Friends to make. And no milking. Mind you, the nuns do have a cow or two, and the boarders take it in turns to milk. But that’s not every morning, is it?”

She said calmly, “I don’t mind milking. I have a poddy calf called Chuckles.” Her tough little hands were folded in her lap.

“You understand… there might be others who have a claim on the farm.”

She said nothing. Was she thinking of farms elsewhere that could be held on to?

“My own boy, Johnny. I’m sending him to the nuns from May. Sooner if the little ruffian gets into trouble. The boarding students down there… they complain about food. Well, you’ll have no need to. I’ll make sure you’ve got ham and chocolate, and a regular supply of cocoa.”

So these were items of the world’s trade to a doubting little orphaned heart. A full can of Fry’s Cocoa. She didn’t seem to take notice. Too busy tasting the world, gauging what it would do to her, doubtful of what he said to explain it to her.

“The Sisters of Mercy,” he muttered, more for his own comfort than hers.

“But I’ll need my clothes,” she told him suddenly.

“Of course you will, of course.”

“Hector will need his too. Mrs. Sutter’ll wash his, I suppose.”

Tim turned Pee Dee’s head towards Glenrock.

“Look,” lied Tim. “No one has anything against you.”

He knew she saw through that.

“I don’t have a thing against you. You’re a fine little woman. I wish there was room.”

“Your place is very small,” she stated. Letting him off the hook. Putting him on it.

Albert Rochester’s little farmhouse on a slope in Glenrock was the standard one they gave you a diagram of in A Guide for Immigrants and Settlers. It was supported not on piers of brick like Mrs. Sutter’s but on stumps of trees capped with a plate of zinc to defeat termites. It was unpainted, and the door had no lock. The inside walls, Tim found when he and Lucy entered, were not lined, but pasted over with old Heralds and Chronicles and Arguses. The energetic North Coast spiders had filled in every panel of the wall frames with misty web.

There was a note on the scrubbed kitchen table which said,

Some shirts and underwear hanging from a string by the dead fire. They were Bert’s and the boy’s and a chemise of the girl’s. Let Mrs. Sutter, Bert’s near-wife, sort Bert’s stuff out. But the girl went over and took the chemise and folded it up and put it in a sugar bag which had till now lain on a chair. She took the bag into the other room, and he could see her through the open door putting other things in it. He noticed a picture of thin Bert and his pinched wife on the deal dresser at the end of the room. A wedding picture. Mrs. Rochester stood up to her wedding day wearing a hat, and the little hands she was to give Lucy were meekly folded in front of her. Blessed was she meek and hers was the kingdom of heaven these days, where, if what was taken as gospel had any value, she had got Bert back and was consoling him again.

It was nearly out of his mouth to tell Lucy to take the photo. He was close to saying, “While you’re here you’ll want to…” But then he knew he’d be ashamed to see it in her hands, the reproach of her departed parents. It could be collected at another time. At the time of the final notice kindly Jim Coleman spoke of. If from anyone, the notice would probably come from the British Australia and New Zealand Bank. They would want to sell for certain. Mrs. Sutter had already said she wouldn’t buy Bert’s hard little hillside. She needed something like a pub instead, to feed all her children.

Tim talked the child into leaving Hector’s clothes for collection by Mrs. Sutter. The woman should come here for the task—that much was owed to Bert.

He was pleased the girl was finished and they got out again and left Bert’s herds to the neighbour. She didn’t ask for the poddycalf. She knew that attachment was at an end. Chuckles belonged to the bank too.

They followed the route back to town they had taken the day before, past the accident scene again. It had been all cleared away, the horse taken, the wreckage removed, the blood sunk numbly into a wet earth. The next flood would find it there. Bert would rise with the water. “We saw a man out there walking on the flood. His face shining.” That sort of thing commonly reported both in North Cork and the Macleay…

At last around the corner into Belgrave Street, home of the living land of pubs and emporia, of Nance’s Chemist, of Philip Sheridan Solicitor, Joss Walker Tailor, Taylor’s Book Office, and Tibbett’s Ladies’ Wear. And modestly at the end, where Smith and Belgrave made a right-angle, in the blue and gold awning paint, his own store.

Crossing from the Chronicle office to the Commercial Hotel for purposes the whole town knew of was the Offhand, a little ferrety bloke with an ironic face and a frightful pallor. He wore a grey suit and a stained collar. A blueness marked his jowls. Editor-in-chief of the Macleay Chronicle. Employed by the owner Hinton to pursue definite editorial policies. They were free trade and the Federation of the Australian colonies. Offhand confessed to being a former parson of the Diocese of Southwark. He poked fun at those who were always writing from New South Wales to the Queen or the Archbishop of Canterbury, warning them that Papist symbols and rituals were creeping into the liturgy of the Church of England in New South Wales. He’d never married, at least not in New South Wales; though he had a friend. Poor fellow a dipsomaniac. A good, democratic Englishman though.

The democracy and irony endeared him to Tim, who reached now for the rim of his own hat to greet him.

“Whoa Tim!” cried the Offhand, and Tim reined Pee Dee in successfully in the middle of Belgrave Street. The Offhand caught up to him with a shuffling walk.

“Tim,” he said a second time.

He had traces of a jaunty kind of cockney accent.

“Just to say we are all in admiration of your bravery and compassion in re Rochester. One Mr. Bandy Habash has been in our office extolling your rescue, and your taking in one of the children. Is this young lady here one of Mr. Rochester’s?”

“This one is Lucy,” said Tim. He was not at ease. He’d felt threatened by the Offhand’s exorbitant praise. “Habash did a first class job, too. He brought peace to the horse with the trace in its poor bloody entrails.”

“Tuppence,” murmured Lucy.

“What?”

“Tuppence,” said Lucy. “Our horse Tuppence.”

“Yes.”

“Is young Lucy going to live at the store?” asked Offhand.

“I’m going to see the nuns,” said Tim.

“Then you’re a fine fellow,” said the Offhand. “Those nuns are expensive.”

Tim didn’t want to be called that just then. Going to the nuns was callousness in his book, not fineness.

The Offhand said, “Young Habash even told me that you beat his thoroughbred there…”

What did Habash want? Enough reflected glory to get him in the bloody Turf Club?

“His thoroughbred was knackered. Too much buggerising around in Smith Street…”

“And you then carried the deceased on your own horse all the way to the Macleay District Hospital.”

“Ditto,” said Tim, almost to himself. “His horse was knackered, for dear God’s sake.”

The Offhand smiled and rubbed his jaw in a way which bespoke relentless thirst.

“Mr. Malcolm of the Royal Humane Society is sufficiently impressed,” he said. “Mr. Habash has been to see him too.”

“My God,” said Tim.

The Offhand reached out and patted Pee Dee’s haunches as if the conversation were now nearly at its end.

“If you want your valour or compassion cut back in any way, you’ve spoken to me too late, Tim. The tale as relayed by Habash and by Sister Raymond at the hospital is already set in print.”

“Then why in God’s name didn’t you consult me?”

The Offhand laughed. “The gallant Hibernian speaks. Dislike of public praise is the mark of true heroes, Tim.”

“Any news though of that girl?” asked Tim, since that was about the only news that could matter. He had felt Missy pressing him, insisting through all his helpless dreams.

“A bad thing to have lying around,” agreed Offhand. He wasn’t anguished, of course. Why should he be? All the bereavements of the world washed up through the cable laid under seas and over mountains and ended up grounded in the Chronicle’s pages. “Meanwhile I’m off for my morning tea.”

The Offhand started on his way. That was the trouble with him: he was too quirky. People made more of his contrariness as a columnist than they did of his opinions.

On top of that he had a three weeks overdue account at T. Shea—General Store. So he was lucky he hadn’t met Kitty.

Dumpling Kitty in the store was seated in a chair behind the counter. Johnny was drawing with chalk on the blackbutt boards which made the floor.

“Holy Christ, woman. I’ve told you not to let the boy do his art in the middle of the store.”

Lucy Rochester looked at the boy, who raised his head and stared back blankly without malice and with keen interest. His son. He could turn out to be a great lop-eared Australian—few opinions, few ideas. If they weren’t careful with him.

“Mrs. Sutter wasn’t disposed towards the girl?” asked Kitty.

“She took the boy in.”

Tim was partly shamed to be talking like this in front of Lucy Rochester, who stood there with her leg injury still wrapped in the neutral mercy of white rag.

“Well, there’s no advantage to Mrs. Sutter any more,” asked Kitty fiercely, “is there?”

He hated her tightened mouth at such times, as right as she might be. He hated her to carry her face in those lines. When he had had their wedding picture taken by Josh Hendy and sent a copy each of two different poses to his parents, his father had written back to him. “To hand, the photos of your admirable wife and yourself, and all the arbiters of beauty and elegance here around proclaimed her to be as supreme in excellence as could scarcely be described…” The poor old fellow had never met her, of course. She’d come to Tim, in answer to his letter of proposal, direct from Red Kenna’s hearth, and had never got round to visiting Newmarket during their courtship.

And on the right day, smiling at Josh Hendy’s dicky bird in the camera, she justified the judgment of those North Cork arbiters. But she could turn off at will the generous gleam behind her eyes.

“Johnny,” he told his son, “take Lucy out to the kitchen and show her where the lemonade is.” And to the girl, “You know how to slip the stopper off the lemonade do you, darling? Good.”

Johnny wilfully did not hear and went on with his chalkwork.

“Holy Christ, Johnny, will you do it!”

Kitty put another tuck in her mouth and he heard her murmur, “So, of course, it’s the boy who has to pay for the world’s grief.”

Johnny dropped his chalk and got up and flapped his arms like wings, a gesture Tim would remember at later dates.

“Come on, come on,” he told the girl.

“So how’s trade?” Tim asked when the children had gone.

“Old Crashaw’s left an order. And Mrs. Malcolm was in.” She put on a fake ceremonial voice to say that. “I think she was disappointed not to find you here, you know. You’re her golden boy.”

“What stupid talk!” he said.

“She tells me you’re a hero. I told her in return that you weren’t game enough to face up to the nuns.”

“Holy God! We would have had room for people like this girl at the pub, if you’d been prompter.”

The old grievance. Kitty’d been booked to come to Sydney aboard the Persic, and he’d told the New South Wales Licensing Board that she would be in the Macleay in time to help him take up the Jerseyville Hotel. Then her oldest sister decided to be married and so Kitty chose to stay on at home until that event, changing her steamer booking to the Runic a month later. You had to be a married man to be a pub licensee in New South Wales. The license went to the married Whelans by default. Just for a Kenna marriage feast.

“One day I’ll bloody kill you for saying that,” she told him. “I won’t take endless blame for the Jerseyville Hotel. What a bloody hole Jerseyville is anyhow. And what sort of publican would you have been? A mark for every sponger! I didn’t understand what I was doing when I changed the steamer. But I tell you it was a mercy. Someone was watching over us. Because you can hardly manage the supply of food and kerosene let alone grog. And the silly desire to keep your hands clean of lucre. Well, look at this!”

She took from her pocket an account from a Sydney supply house, Staines and Gould. He could read their Gothic-printed name on the top.

“You give three months’ terms to people and the Sydney houses want to be paid in two. This is our disaster, Tim. Not that I went to a wedding. Nor have a sister coming here. The fact that you have some mad scruple about asking people to pay you for what you’ve already supplied.”

“Then I’ll ask people.”

“You’d better do it or we’ll end in some bloody hole by the roadside!”

“That only happens in Ireland,” he protested, and went through into the residence. In the dining room, the girl and Annie were drinking lemonade from large glasses. Lucy sat in a chair, and Annie had climbed up there and seated herself beside her, checking on her sideways, and then mimicking her posture exactly.

“We must go now, Lucy,” he said, and the severity of the sentence startled both girl children. Johnny should be here to say good-bye but was missing somewhere, a bloody ragamuffin. Up a tree, or under the back of the residence, terrifying the wobbegong spiders.

“You’ll see her again,” he said then to Annie, in a voice out of which he took all the sting which came from the direction of Staines and Gould, Mother Imelda, Kitty.

Little Kitty, five feet and no inches, followed him and Lucy out to Pee Dee and the wagon. Kitty had a wad of dockets in her hand. She gave them to him.

“Show that old nun these, all unpaid. She’s only a woman, you know, she’s got armpits like the rest.”

“Christ, you know I can’t push dockets at Imelda.”

She took them from his hand again and began to push them into the pockets of his vest.

On the way to the convent, no one rushed up to acclaim him, and he felt all the better for that. He was able to feel, therefore, an ordinary citizen, which was half of his secretly desired condition. The other half of the desired condition was for people to say, “There goes Mr. Shea. Generous man.” Not for such definitions to appear in print, but for them to recur in the mouths of Macleay citizens. This was the vanity Kitty mistrusted in him.

Bryson of West had different ideas. He had a storekeeper’s meanness, and delighted in people saying, “Shrewd old bastard!” He had farmers put up land as guarantee against his supplying them credit on jam and flour. The way to wealth and property in the new land. Hard to imagine the mean and continuous effort of the brain needed for enterprises like that. To Tim it was like an effort of extreme mathematics. Why make it? So customary was all this in the bush, though, that farmers had come to Tim and offered to sign letters of agreement for credit. Pride wouldn’t let him enforce them.

As the big convent in Kemp Street loomed up, he said to the girl as another inducement, “I will come and take you on a visit to Crescent Head with Mrs. Shea and the children. Have to get up early in the morning to get to Crescent Head!”

The memory of Crescent Head’s ozone and surf hissed in the summer street. A favoured place.

But it was a silly gesture against the numb, grave fact. She was nobody’s child.

Tim knocked on the large, glass-panelled door at the front of the convent. Very strange, the smell of convents. Brass polish, bees’ wax, a lingering scent of extinguished candles.

The youngest nun answered the door. Only eighteen months off the boat. All that black serge these women wore. Welcome in frozen Ireland. How did it feel here? What did they sleep in, these poor women, in this heat? How did they make their peace with the thick night in New South Wales?

A pleasant-looking young woman, some farmer’s lost child from Offaly or Kerry. A native elegance in her despite the pigshit in her family farmyard. Her noble-faced mother—Tim could just imagine her—carrying her bitter secrets in her face, the secrets of her womb, the secrets of short funds and high rent. Dragged down by the gravity of things. And the child thinks, I can get above this! The sacrifice of earthly love a small thing, since the rewards of earthly love were so quickly diminished and brought to bugger-all.

And here she was answering a door in the Macleay. In a place which had once been a rumour but was now too solid, and its sun so high.

She seemed happy though. At least she harboured that young intention to have the joy of the Lord shine forth from her face.

She said, “It’s Mr. Shea isn’t it?”

The consecrated woman showed them through into the front parlour. Here stood a big dresser and a bees-waxed table and upright chairs. On the wall the lean, amiable-looking Pope Leo XIII, and the visage of Bishop Eugene Skelton, Bishop of Lismore, New South Wales. On a pedestal in the corner a plaster Saint Vincent de Paul. On a pedestal by the window the Virgin Mary in blue and white crushed the serpent with her foot.

Tim and Lucy did not sit at the table. It had very much the air of being reserved for higher events. They sat instead on a settee of severe lines, covered with maroon cloth.

The young nun went to fetch her superior.

“These are just women, you know,” Tim told Lucy. “Women like Mrs. Sutter. Women like my wife. They dress in that way. Tradition. But they have instincts of care, like all other women.”

For he seemed to remember Albert Rochester was a Primitive Methodist, and all these nunnish robes and furnitures would have been accursed in his eyes. His wizened daughter, though, took them as they came.

Mother Imelda could be heard thumping up the corridor and now burst into the room. A big woman, her beads clicking against her unimaginable thighs.

“Well, Mr. Shea!” she cried out, closing the door for herself. She’d once told him that her father had owned a warehouse in Waterford, but he had wondered in that case what she was doing here in her Order’s remotest province. Surely, unless he’d gone broke, her father could have swung her a grander appointment than commanding Christ’s outpost amongst the bush-flash children of cow-cockies in the Macleay. Of course, maybe adventure called, as it had with him—if adventure was the dream of separateness, of not seeking out the common landfalls of your clans: Boston, Brooklyn. These matters weren’t accessible to thought or to measurement.

The Primitive Methodist waif had stood up too, though her closed demeanour gave nothing away. “Sit, sit,” said Mother Imelda, dragging one of the chairs out from under the solemn table and sitting on it, the black cloth of her thumping big hips and thighs dominating the small child on the sofa.

Tim now said who this was. The Rochester child. Mother Imelda may have heard of the accident… Now Mrs. Shea had both a child and sister on the way, hence it was impossible… The Sisters of Mercy were the only boarding school in the valley… Mrs. Shea and I wanted her well looked after… Of course, her dead father’s wishes must be respected, and her own as a child who has reached the age of reason. So she is a Protestant, and that must be observed.

Mother Imelda laughed and patted the polished surface of the table. “We don’t lack here for children who are Protestant.”

“Then I would like to see her taken on by you, Mother.”

Mother Imelda looked out past the picture of the Supreme Pontiff and through the lace at the window towards the huge glare outside. Often Tim looked into the nullity of Australian air and wondered what it meant for the existence of a living God. All that light a question put to the sorts of things people believed in dimmer regions, twelve thousand miles away. But it did not seem to wither Mother Imelda’s certainty. It did not seem to put a crease in it.

“Lucy, do you think you would like to join us here? We put a large stress on cleanliness and on obedience. We do not countenance backchat. Did you have backchat at home?”

Tim said, “I’ve found that little Miss Rochester rarely engages in forward chat let alone the back variety.”

Somehow Mother Imelda did not quite relish the little joke.

“Well, Mr. Shea. Given your domestic arrangements, I understand that you would want Miss Rochester to be a year-round boarder.”

Tim felt himself colour with shame. It was a question he had not thought of; was the child to have her Christmases and her Easters in the convent or was there a place for her at his table?

He said, prickling, “We would, of course, take the child for outings and the larger holidays. But it seems this will be… this will be where she lives. I can’t think of better.”

Mother Imelda put her hand cursorily to Lucy Rochester’s small chin. “Are those your clothes there. In the bag?”

“I will provide a better port for her, Mother,” said Tim.

“You should go outside and sit on the verandah. I want you to tell me how many magpies you count in the trees about.”

The small girl rose, keeping her eyes on Tim, and went, opening and closing the door so smoothly.

Now Tim knew he must make a proposal. Imelda would say how much a week. She advertised in the Argus, day pupils thrippence a week. How much for boarders? They ate of his groceries, half his anyhow. The other half from Doolan’s in West. Keep the two good Irish tradesmen happy. Happy about what? Since the goods were supplied for what could loosely be called the love of God. He hoped Imelda informed the Deity of the way she stretched him.

She stared at his chest. He was aware of the dockets in his breast pocket. He imagined they still had the faint warmth of Kitty’s firm hand on them. He would need to make a deal… only good sense. Imelda herself was that sort of practical woman. He was underwriting the convent’s edibles and useables to the tune of twenty pounds a year wholesale, and that was over thirty pounds retail. What was so blasphemous about her taking the child’s boarding fees out in jam and cheese?

Yet he was flinching within. He wasn’t scared of the woman. Rather he did not want her to shame him, or the thoroughness of Albert’s tragedy, with haggling.

So he started first. He wanted to be able to tell Kitty that. I started first.

He managed to say, “So, Mother Imelda, we must come to an accommodation I suppose.”

He recognised at once in Imelda that dangerous blitheness of someone about to frame the best transaction they can for themselves. “It is thrippence a day to the day school. We add on ninepence a week for boarders. For year-round boarders—we have one other—we give a two week discount, and so that is fifty shillings a year. Can you afford that, Mr. Shea?”

The question affronted him. His hand was already in his vest pocket. He would lay all the causes why he should get special consideration down in front of her.

“I was hoping,” he said, “that since the child is not mine, and in view of some of my offerings to your community here, you might meet me part of the way.”

“Does Mr. Rochester have an estate?”

“There may be a shilling or two left when the bank’s finished. It’s a matter of doubt, though.”

“You know how we are placed, Mr. Shea. From some parents we have to beg. We have expenses too, legal expenses, for instance. The town clerk is a member of the Orange Lodge and we are subject to more inspections and interference and legal argument than any of the hotels in town. We are the hotel of God, that’s why. We can’t and won’t soften him with a bottle of whisky every fortnight. The way things are now it would be in all frankness hard for us to take Lucy, even though the situation cries out to mercy. We have to give our preferences to the Catholic poor, who unhappily abound and are in many cases themselves orphans.”

Bugger it. Going against his nature, he had already debased himself enough and to no good effect.

“Of course I can meet the child’s fees then,” he told her.

Generosity the chief revenge. He had his now. He felt a serenity at such a moment which he could not obtain by any other means.

“It is payable at a term in advance,” said Imelda, a miser for Jesus’ sake. “That’s sixteen shillings and sixpence ha’penny for the first term, Tim.”

Tim hunted in the other pocket of his vest and found two ten shilling notes. He handed her both notes.

“Perhaps you could give me a receipt at some stage, Mother.”

“You are always in our prayers, Mr. Shea, and your lovely little wife.”

Bloody sight littler than you anyhow, Imelda. Just the same, what a bloody grocer this woman would have been! Savage’s Emporium wouldn’t have touched her. She would have pursued debtors along the riverflats of Euroka, into the cedar camps of the Hastings Range and amongst the swamps of the lower Macleay. Men coming out of the scrub with grime on their foreheads and an axe on their shoulders to be bushwhacked by big Imelda with her cashbook.

“You may want to give Lucy a few shillings too for expenses,” Imelda suggested.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Tim, going for his pocket again. He hoped that from the point of view of some abstract critic, which was partly himself and partly a subscriber to a progressive age, he did not look too much like a willing peasant, being sucked dry by a hungry Faith. He wanted this unseen critic to accept that he was acceding to Imelda as a matter of grandeur, of style. Because he did not want to live meanly.

Largely drained of cash, he said good-bye to the child in the corridor. No kisses. He opened her hand, then clasped it in both his, and when she opened it, she found five shillings in it.

“Take good care of that, miss,” said Imelda looking on. “It will be quite safe, Mr. Shea. We expel without fear or favour for theft.”

She opened the front door for Tim, but as soon as he was through she shut it softly, and the conventual silence closed like an ocean over Lucy Rochester’s mute head.

So now, lighter and prouder, he still had to face Kitty. Pee Dee was bending his head down and stealing some grass through the convent’s picket fence.

“Get it into you there, Pee Dee old son,” Tim told him. “Eat her grass. Fifty bobs’ worth.”

Missy, just like Lucy, made her claims on him through silence, and now for the sake of Missy’s uncertain and omnipresent spirit he must top off the day’s berserk largesse. He left Pee Dee to benefit from thief Imelda, and walked to the door of the presbytery. One of the larger houses in town. Just like at home, they comforted themselves pretty well for keeping to lonely beds.

The ancient widow who cooked for the priests answered the door.

“Is Father Bruggy in?” he asked.

“Wait,” said the woman liquidly. “I will see.”

Her accent. He’d heard she was a Belgian. Closing the door then. It wasn’t right she did that, as if he were a supplicant or a thief. It was said that the seminarians who were the sons of the poorer Irish farmers were sent to New South Wales as priests. Yet someone had taught them to behave like people of high class.

The tall, very pale priest named Bruggy was suddenly at the door. He’d had consumption. That may have been why he’d signed on for a subtropic diocese. But didn’t the humid air also weigh on the lungs? It often weighed on his own.

“Hello there, Tim.”

The man sounded weary, as always saddened and thinned down at finding humanity’s tricks so standard, pole to pole. For it might cross the minds of priests and nuns in Ireland that if they travelled twelve thousand miles, they might outrun original sin, slip aboard their steamers into the island chains of innocence. Not so though. The old Adam was already waiting for them on the new shores. Met every damned boat.

“I wondered could I have a word,” said Tim in a hush, to convey it was not a normal theological matter.

“Yes,” the priest agreed, but without much hope of hearing anything new. He motioned Tim to a green-painted garden seat on the verandah. The parlour would have been offered for others. It would be the parlour for the lawyer Sheridan.

Tim wished those things didn’t worry him so much.

“There is a young woman who died here, and Constable Hanney has possession of her head and is showing it to people, hoping they can name her.”

The priest coughed a little into his hand. “I was shown her also. In case she had been to us for counsel, or to the church for a visit. I told the constable it would be exceptional for one of our faith to seek the death of her child in that way.”

Tim said, “But she was just a child herself. I found her face pitiful. I’d like a Mass said for her repose.”

Rich people offered a crown for a Mass for the repose. Some as little as two bob. Hard-up cow-cockies sometimes put up a shamefaced shilling for a Mass of remembrance, though anyone would want to do better than that for their dead. Tim offered his crown coin by putting it down on one of the green slats of the chair.

The priest looked at it and grimaced. He coughed a bit and said, “Hugely generous of you, Tim.” But perhaps he meant hugely odd. “I’ll give you a Mass card. But I don’t think her chances are too good.” He meant by that the only chances worth anything: eternal chances. “Perhaps you should apply your offering to broader purposes, including this unfortunate girl as one element?”

“Well there is a broader purpose. I’d like her name discovered so she can rest.”

The priest wheezed slowly, and you could smell his shaving soap and his camphor-soaked handkerchief.

“She was murdered making a murder,” he said.

“Yes, but a normal girl’s face, Father. In a sense, anyhow.”

Tim beginning to rankle. These people were always telling you parables about the poor and despised coming amongst you, Christ in another guise. Why did they never suspect this girl might have been sent to sort them out?

He should have given the old bugger ten bob. It would have given him greater freedom to express his ideas.

Bruggy said, “These need to be read out from the pulpit, Tim. The Mass intentions. Why don’t I say, For a Secret Intention? Anything more flamboyant might excite and distract the Faithful.”

“That’s fine with me. A secret intention.”

“You need to resist the village rubbish they believe at home, Tim. Don’t for a moment consider yourself haunted.”

Easy to bloody say.

“Of course, when Constable Hanney came here, I realised I might be haunted myself if I let it happen… But don’t be superstitious about it.”

“Somebody’s child, Father,” said Tim.

“Exactly,” said the priest. “But everyone’s child goes to judgment.”

Now Tim stood up. “Not to keep you any further…”

“Hold hard, Tim. I’ll write you that Mass card. A sort of divine receipt if you like.”

He didn’t want anything like that lying around the house to provoke Kitty.

“No need for a card,” he said.

The priest coughed and considered him. “Tim, you didn’t happen to know this girl, did you?”

“No. Wish I had, in fact. Set her to rest.”

As he left the priest picked up the crown from the verandah seat absent-mindedly. A non-avaricious man. Could afford to be, of course.

Tim found that with his energetic nibbling Pee Dee had dislodged a fence paling.

“You bloody blackguard!” Tim genially told the horse.

He untethered the beast and led the dray quickly down the street, not getting up on the board until they were well past the Australia Hotel on the corner of Kemp and Elbow. Safe in the heart of secular Kempsey.