A River Town

Six

ON SUNDAYS when Tim had her home for dinner, Lucy Rochester ate it with the rest of them in the silence Tim required. The same silence which had been ordained by his father at table in Glenlara, a townland of Newmarket, County Cork, in Munster of the kings and the Kingdom of Ireland. A fellow of standards. Dear Jerry Shea.

But it seemed that behind the august silence of Sunday dinner, Lucy kept an extra, secretive silence of her own. He would have liked her to say she liked life in boarding school, or even to weep and beg him to get her out. She seemed cautious to give him neither one version nor the other.

Comfort could be taken from observing little Annie, who examined gristle in her fingers exactly like a scientist making up a picture in his head of a whole beast out of one of the fragments. Silence suited Annie’s style. Early in courtship he’d told Kitty he preferred silent tables, their ceremony. That was fine by her though it hadn’t been the way things were done at Red Kenna’s. She’d travelled fourteen thousand miles on the White Star Line from Red’s disordered board to the Shea Sunday table in the Macleay. Jeremiah Shea’s little triumph at the limits of the Empire was the silence maintained here in the shop residence.

A penny chocolate for all hands at the end of the meal. By these normal exercises he kept at length an idea which plagued him by night: that he should perhaps for Missy’s sake press sergeants and commissioners to put her into the hands of someone of greater strength of spirit than Constable Hanney.

He greased the axle on Sunday afternoons, a soothing Sabbath task. Meanwhile the river drew the children. He kept an eye on them. They would be no more than poor bloody little leaves on the surface of its powerful charm. One time, looking up, he saw Lucy and Annie and Johnny all together in a rowing boat. How had the little buggers managed that? A silent plan carried out between them. Lucy on one oar, Johnny on the other, an uneven match. Tim heard Annie begin shrilling with fright or pleasure, you couldn’t tell which. Saw the boat swirling in a lazy current, downriver towards the great black pylons of the still largely imaginary, unbuilt bridge.

“Bring that bloody thing back in here!” Tim yelled.

The girls would float in their pinafores. Flapping their hands. But it would be Lucy who would come to shore, and Annie’s sedate spirit that would be likely to sink.

Kitty was lax about the river, philosophic, leaving the children to luck. To the Angel of God. My guardian dear, to whom God’s care commits me here, ever this day be up to my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen. A more regular kick in the ass for Johnny was certainly called for, yet his puzzled, animal watchfulness turned away wrath.

The children got the oars working together and brought the boat back to the river bank. Lucy piggy-backing Annie ashore.

And after Lucy had been taken back to the care of the Mercy nuns, Annie says, when she’s in her night dress and he is about to read to her from her Funny Picture Book, “Lucy pulls the bung out from the boat.”

“What?”

“Lucy lets the water in the boat. That’s why I screamed Papa!”

“Well, don’t you go into the boat with her.”

He would discuss this with Kitty except she would take it as a final reason to limit Lucy to the boarding school and not let her into the house. Bung-pulling would go to warrant the lack of room for the orphan in the shop residence. Tim in the storeroom later in the week when the postmaster’s son turned up on a bicycle and rang the bell on the counter. Tim came out from making up the orders, from that lovely odour of kerosene and shortbread, candles and tea-leaves, and saw the peculiar envelope in the boy’s hand.

“Is that a telegram there?” asked Tim. It evoked the first one he’d ever encountered, the one which said REGRET NOT ARRIVING BY SS PERSIC IN VIEW MARRIAGE OF SISTER STOP TRAVELLING NEXT MONTH BY SS RUNIC.

“For Mrs. Kitty Shea,” said the boy.

Characteristic: Kitty a casual client of the wonders of the age.

“Would you sign my book?”

Tim did. He found Kitty at the dining room table drinking tea with one hand and feeling her back with the other. Such a squat frame to take the full weight of maternity, to carry a reasonably tall fellow’s children.

It struck him as he handed it over: Could it be something dismal about Red Kenna or her mother? But somehow he could not envisage even one of those wild children rushing into Doneraile to a telegraph office, instead of writing a more kindly letter. Rowdy at table, yes, yet they liked to talk and explain at length. So they would have thought of sea mail as the proper organ for sad, detailed news. He hoped he could swear to that.

“Have you ever received a telegram before?” he asked as cheerily as he could. “You’ve got one today, Mrs. Kitty Shea.”

She was eager at once. “Wouldn’t it astound you?” she murmured.

When she had it in her hands and had opened and begun to read it, she broke out in laughter. Her laugh delightful to him; unless directed to someone like Bandy Habash, or joined in with the relentless chorus of her loud family.

“Isn’t this Mamie to the nearest square inch? It’s from a ship at sea. Who’d think of sending a cable from a ship at sea? She must have been drinking.”

Kitty stood up to read it. “ARRIVE MELBOURNE TUESDAY 10TH—Holy God, that’s just tomorrow! STAYING WITH MAGS PHELAN MIGRANT WOMENS HOSTEL ONE WEEK EMBARK SS IRIS TO SYDNEY ON TUESDAY 18 EXCITED SISTERLY LOVE—MAMIE.”

When she’d finished reading, Kitty’s breath escaped her. “Oh huh!” She sat down at the table, and began to laugh again. “Of all the people you’d pick as likely to send cables from a ship at sea!”

He smiled too, but was thinking with a new clarity, my God another one of them. One more robust woman to feed. As long as the two Kenna boys didn’t decide to come. Powerful, little mottled men with gappy smiles. Devout drinkers like their father. Although the bush, the reaches of Euroka and Toorooka, would in the end absorb their rowdiness.

He heard Kitty still laughing. “You’ve got to watch that Mamie. Go through you for a short cut!”

The fact was Mamie already ashore and laughing in Melbourne. The Kenna girls bracketing the great east coast of the continent of Australia with their hectic laughter. It was to be hoped she didn’t laugh too much with some unreliable fellow.

Tim himself had never seen Mrs. Malcolm’s great gold city of Melbourne, except from a distance. He’d had to stay aboard his ship with influenza. Had walked the low foreshores of Fremantle, the ones that made you wonder what you’d let yourself in for. But not Melbourne. Melbourne had this august, distant aura in his mind.

He’d landed in Sydney still fevered and hoped for clerk’s work, but the clerks were out of work here too. So it was the truth: hard times all over the globe. He’d been a little surprised at that. He hadn’t got out of the hard times latitudes. At the Migrant Settlement Office, they were advertising for carters for the Macleay.

Sydney seemed a close, warm, seedy city of rough and casual manners—out of key with his normal way of doing business. But the tone… something in the tone of the place suited him. He would have stayed if the job had been there.

He remembered liking the huge noisy pubs where you could be quiet and unknown, and make a shy friendship with another newcomer and share crumbs of information you had picked up from this landfall.

These days Molly Kenna, the first arriving sister, reverted to form only in Kitty’s company. For example, Tim could hear Kenna laughter surging from the residence as he arrived at the storefront one afternoon after deliveries. He left Pee Dee tethered outside, still in the traces, meditating in his chaff bag, and came in through the store. It was women’s laughter he could hear. Kitty’s ringing in the midst of it.

He went through the store into the residence out the back and came upon the visitors seated at the crowded table set with the Stafford china, a silver cake stand glittering, and the plate with shepherds painted on it laden with shortbread.

First in view, long-faced Old Burke smoking his aromatic and temperamental pipe. Husband of Molly Kenna. He’d come here before Molly was even born. A twenty-year-old timber cutter. There had still been at that time convict shipwrights and labourers working around the river for Enoch Rudder, the town’s founder, a West Country Englishman who’d built small launches and tried everything from maize to vineyards. A long time ago, Burke moved far upriver and selected a little land at Pee Dee. Always a very frugal fellow. A lot of sheep up the river in those days, but the rich pasturage devoted now to cattle. Burke owned steeper slopes too, covered with a bountiful native growth of blackbutt and other hardwoods.

Buying up the land of other small selectors, and fragments here and there of the original land grants to English gentlemen, this canny Antrim labourer had taken on and still possessed the gravity which land gives a person.

At Tim’s dinner table now he was smoking his aromatic pipe, and sat a little separate from his wife, Molly Burke. Molly had acquired the Burke gravity too, though you could see she was letting it slip a bit today. She’d been enough like a Kenna when she’d first arrived on Burrawong and worked in the store. Some of the smaller dairy farmers who were bachelors hung around a lot to joke with her and to be melodiously laughed at.

Old Burke’s daughter Ellen—by his first, deceased wife—sat at the table today too. A tall girl, and would be a big one later in life. Sixteen or was it seventeen years? She had pretty features—Burke’s features in fact transmuted and graced. According to what Kitty said, she had no cross words at all for her stepmother, Molly. Ellen Burke had been one of Mother Imelda’s students too until two years ago. She could play the piano for occasional visitors to Pee Dee—Constable Hanney, Mr. Chance the stock and station agent, Dr. Erson, Father Bruggy. Bandy Habash? Was Bandy allowed into the homestead for recitals?

Tim said, “Hello to all.”

Young Ellen rose and politely laid a place for him at the table, saving pregnant Kitty the trouble.

You could see, despite Molly’s new respectability, the glimmer of a kind of conspiracy between the two sisters. Even Ellen Burke was in it too.

Tim asked the expected questions—why they were in town, how their two-horse cart had stood up to the hilly grades upriver. (Old Burke believed in getting himself to town without spending cash on the Armidale stage.) A good run it seemed to have been for them. Up the first morning before four—Old Burke’s normal rising hour anyhow. First a long day to the pub at Willawarrin where they put up. Then making good time from Willawarrin at dawn to Kempsey late afternoon. Ellen read to them a large part of the way. Charles White’s History of Australian Bushranging. “Lawless rubbish!” said Burke, “and glorified cattle-duffing. But it stimulates the women.”

“We said the Rosary too,” said Molly. “The whole fifteen decades spaced out throughout the day. Made the time pass.”

Following the long river down, the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, the incense of those old prayers rising amongst the heathen eucalypts. But they seemed to Tim to be delighted to have made the journey, the Burkes. Old Burke said with lenient disapproval that the women had been after him to come to town for months. But the real reason he was here was to go to court.

He complained sepulchrally, “Bloody man has cattle duffed by some scoundrel, and has to travel two days there and back to give evidence of it.”

“Well,” said Molly, winking across the table, “this is one of those cases where Mohammed has to come to the mountain.”

All the women laughed. They were ready for it.

Working to keep his pipe going, struggling with the damned thing, re-packing it, re-lighting it, strewing his plate with used matches, Old Burke told the story. A dairy farmer called Stevens from Clybucca was found in possession of a heifer bearing Burke’s brand which was a BB. Stevens was a bloody Scot and he might as well have been talking Gaelic for all you could understand him. “But he’s a cute bastard,” Old Burke added.

Tim noticed the women were beginning to clear, a dish of this and a cup of that, and trail out to the kitchen. Soon you could hear them talking out there, saying loud bird-like things. They’d obviously heard enough about Old Burke and Stevens.

“…so when Sergeant Fry asks him why he has my poley heifer in his back paddock, the crafty old bugger says, But I sent seven pounds with Ferguson the bullocky who goes up to Pee Dee for timber. Hasn’t bloody Ferguson given it to Mr. Burke?”

“My God!” said Tim, sounding appalled because Old Burke wanted him to. “How would a Clybucca dairy farmer be, putting shoes on his children’s feet? What with paying seven quid for one of your heifers?”

“That’s the right bloody question to ask. But you see, under our justice, all stories stand up. But not before a man had to travel two bloody days and put up with that drunken cook at the Willawarrin Hotel on the way through.”

Burke did even further sucking and tending of the pipe. Yet he wasn’t really upset about his journey to town. An old man content with his grievances. He’d be pretty disgusted, of course, if Stevens the dairy farmer got away with his story. He’d be a two-day misery for the women all the way back to Pee Dee.

Thinking of where Old Burke came from at the start, and so daring him to exercise the sort of pity Old Burke himself would once have welcomed, Tim said, “The smaller cockies always say they duff cattle to feed their families.”

Old Burke groaned. “They duff cattle to cosset their habits and buy liquor.”

Gales of woman-laughter from the kitchen.

“Listen to them,” murmured Old Burke. “This is very good for Molly and Ellen.”

“You should take them to Sydney next summer,” Tim suggested for mischief’s sake. “Cooler than here. And that’s where the celebrations will be.”

According to all the papers, Sir William Lyne, who’d once opposed the Federation of the Australian states, had now decided it represented the future, and he was full of suggestions and edicts to do with the coming Commonwealth of Australia. He had urged that Tumbarumba should be considered for the national capital! (He must need votes in Tumbarumba.) And his decision was that the chief Federation celebrations should be in Sydney. A nice arrangement for the big town and its businesses. From this enormous state almost too large to be imagined, encompassed, travelled, old Sir William wanted everyone with the rail or boat fare, with a reliable string of horses, to come all that way and so behold the founding of the Federation he had so determinedly fought.

“I wouldn’t grace the event, Tim,” said Old Burke. “Humans bloody astound me. Change for change’s sake. And Sir William Lyne, who used to be a decent feller and against the Federal idea… now in consort with the Sydney Jews and pub-keepers. Trying to conscript people to a festival! Just to watch some hopeless, chinless, English bugger in a cocked hat saying I declare… And can you imagine the bloody footpads and the mashers and the razor gangs everywhere, running round in derby hats. I say, no bloody thanks, Sir William.” Still more pipe-work. “I voted against Federation. You realise we’ll need to have bloody taxes spent on keeping hopeless Tasmania afloat. Ever been to Tasmania, Tim? Awful bloody hole! Full of tattooed criminals. And the weather frightful. Like bloody Donegal with gum trees.”

Tim was pleased with the rise he’d got from Old Burke. Now he kept his voice soft so that he could cause greater annoyance still. Something about Old Burke set him off.

“I think there is a vision in it all, you know. I think there is something of the future to it too. A Federal Australia.”

“Sentimentality,” Old Burke grunted. “This is nothing about Australia. This is all to do with Britain, Tim. They would have us raise a Federal army. And where would that army fight? Like the Irish, like the Scots, like the poor, bloody niggers of India and Africa, this army would die for British enterprises. Read the Freeman’s Journal on this. No, I won’t go to Sydney to honour that kind of arrangement. Not at Billy Lyne’s word. He can go to the whores and lawyers in Phillip Street and order them around! Not me!”

Tim said, “I weighed it up but voted in favour. Do you know why? For the sake of my children.”

“It’s a keen mind that can see a connection between the matter of Federation and his children.”

“I wanted Johnny and Annie, if they chose, to live in South Australia or Western Australia on the same terms as the locals.”

“Why would you want your children to live in West Australia? It’s a desert shore of totally no value.”

“We can’t tell the future.”

“That’s the very cause why I voted no. No, the first time, and still no the second. You’re not telling me you voted yes the first referendum as well as the second?”

“After serious thought,” said Tim.

The truth was that there was something which excited him in the idea of the unity of such immense spaces of earth.

“Well, Tim, I gave you credit for a more sensible fellow.”

“When you have men like Barton in favour,” Tim argued, “and when a feller like George Reid comes around.”

“Puppets,” said Burke. “Look how Barton switched over from Free Trade to Protection once the Jews and the British spoke. And Yes-No Reid. Yes, I want Federation! one day, No, I oppose it! the next. Besides, he’s a lunatic for the women and riddled with social disease.”

Tim smiled. “But has he duffed anyone’s cattle?”

Old Burke took it well. “All jokes aside, I can see a Federal tyranny behind this whole move, and I can see lots of blood in the end. The Americans had their grand bloody federation, and look what blood was spilt at Gettysburg!”

But the huge spaces still sang in Tim’s mind.

The women came in whispering, tamping their laughter down their throats with their pleasing, splayed fingers. Plump Kenna fingers in the case of Kitty and Molly. How these Burke women must run rings around Old Burke’s simple and fixed ideas.

In the residue of the teaparty, for some reason, Kitty kept pressing Annie and Johnny—whenever you could get the latter little bugger in from the paddock out the back—on Ellen Burke, and they all took to each other. Annie ending by sitting on Ellen Burke’s knee. To Tim it all seemed to have a purpose not yet revealed.

Then Tim minded the store while in the dusk Kitty and the children walked the Burkes down Belgrave Street to the Commercial. Good to see Old Burke go, taking the assumptions that went with all his acreage back with him to the Commercial. In the Macleay’s lavender dusk, Tim could see Johnny doing cartwheels for the Burke women in Smith Street’s reddish dust. It was his way of communicating with people.

Kitty and Ellen leaning together, he noticed. What conspiracy?

A bit of swank catching the Terara to Toorooka. Because you could ride by cart there easily cross-country. Even Tim could see the limits of that, though. Going on the river itself, in numbers, was appropriate to Marrieds versus Singles cricket match. A more thorough relief too from amounts owed, spirits unappeased, coppers offended. A day of undistinguished enjoyment in a paddock upriver awaited all passengers.

After an early Mass though. The tales of childhood, after all, were salted with stories of the faithful who missed Mass once for a river excursion, and drowned with their omission screaming to Heaven.

Tim at the presbytery early to renew yet again and for another last time the five bob offering. The secret, relentless intention. “They prefer the company of humans,” Missy still insisted in his dreams. Since he kept delaying writing to the Commissioner of Police (signed “Concerned, Kempsey”) and doubted it might do much good anyhow, he was reduced to more ancient magics at five bob a pop.

The boarding school pupils left the church in two long lines, Lucy at the back, just in front of Imelda and the other nuns. Keeping the heretics close to the sisters. No rosary in Lucy’s hands, no missal. Outside, Tim extracted her from the shadow of Mother Imelda, took her to Kitty and the others in the dray and rode home with her. There, full of an unusual exhilaration and sense of the plenteousness of the world, he took Pee Dee out of his traces and let him loose in his paddock—the horse wouldn’t have been happy with a day spent standing round at Central wharf with a chaff bag round his neck. He would have done his best to get loose and kick buggery out of the buckboards.

And now a sweet walk to the Terara, Kitty on one arm, and a picnic in hand, “Carry me,” aristocratic Annie saying. Tim had bought canvas sandshoes for himself and Johnny, but before they reached the gangplank, bloody Johnny had them off and hung by the laces around his neck. If Tim and Kitty had been born here, the boy still couldn’t have turned out a more thorough colonial urchin.

Big Wooderson, captain of the Marrieds, waited with young Curnow at the head of the gangplank, each greeting his team aboard. Young Curnow wore the whole rig—a straw hat, a blazer and flannels, and a business-like handkerchief tied around his neck to protect him during what he intended to be a long time at the wicket.

“We’ve got Tim,” called Wooderson, spotting the Sheas. “The other fellers are doomed.”

Curnow was a bank clerk and half the women in town were crazy to marry him. Bank clerks happened to be such bloody aristocrats in piss-ant towns at the world’s end. Free of counts and marquis and all that clap, the Macleay citizens made their own tin-pot version. People devoted their energies and waking hours to trying to ensure Kempsey was as caste-ridden as anywhere else on earth. The only saving grace: democracy did break out everywhere and wasn’t punished like at home. The castes were fragile too. One bad season could get rid of the bush aristocrats, one flood, one unwise investment, one reckless act. That could be said. The word hereditary didn’t count for much.

So pretension frayed pretty readily, even if not fast enough. And it didn’t have battalions to support it. A far, far from terrible universe on Terara, under the universal shell of blue. Not yet the heat which would creep up at mid-morning to stupefy those who drank ale too early, nor a prophecy of the afternoon, sure-thing thunderstorm from the mountains.

He was surprised and yet not surprised to see Ernie Malcolm on board, standing by a forward hatch, half in the shade of the awnings, laughing with some of the Singles. This was not a serious Cricket Association game. Yet no social event, planned and advertised, got past Ernie’s attention. You had to give it to him.

On a canvas chair under the awning sat Mrs. Malcolm herself. She was dressed in white for the day, and her white straw hat was loaded with gossamer she could pull down to keep out the flies and wasps of Toorooka. She had at base a divine, willowy shape and yet was somehow tightly bundled up. As if to signal that the world was not to touch. Or was she trying to curb and punish her own beauty? That happened with particular kinds of women.

No whisper of the birth of little Ernies. She often carried a cat in her arms whenever Tim called. A not very distinguished-looking cat. In the ordinary way she stroked it, there seemed to be a prospect of the ordinary offices of motherhood. If so she had better get a move on. About thirty-five years, Tim would guess.

Tim tipped his flannel hat to her. To be a lover to her, even if he were sure he wished to be, could not even be imagined. Like the idea of walking on the moon, in both splendour and reality it evaded all speculation.

“Mr. Shea,” she called in a tired voice. “With your whole family!”

“Mrs. bloody Shea too,” murmured Kitty at his side. “There’s room in the back.” Kitty pointed in the opposite direction to the Malcolms, past Terara’s quaint amidships castle to the stern where another awning had been stretched and canvas chairs set out.

So by Kitty’s decree the Shea family moved on out of sight of Mrs. Malcolm’s half of Terara. “Holy Christ,” whispered Kitty to him, secure in her own squat beauty. “That Mrs. Malcolm’s straight up and down like a yard of pump water. Ernie should feed her up on stout.”

He and Kitty and Annie found three chairs beneath the awning. Nearby two young men were already broaching a keg. Boys would drink too fast and be sick after lunch in Toorooka’s thick grass. He wondered was Hanney, who couldn’t handle enquiries or ale, on board, and the wife who’d been ready to toss blame round so bitterly? Not in sight, thank Christ!

Someone had brought a banjo which could be heard forward. A few bars of “Nellie the Flower of the Bower.” Lucy and Johnny already tearing around the place. She too had ditched her shoes somewhere.

“Why doesn’t Johnny sit still in the cool?” asked Annie in that voice, as if she were raising one of the universe’s most broadly debated questions.

What an august and sturdy thing a river is. Terara pulled away and began its turn in midstream, and at once you felt the tension between the current and Terara’s old iron. Huge forces: the river, Terara’s much-laughed-at engines. But you only laughed at them ashore.

There was an old excitement you couldn’t help in leaving a wharf. Always hard to keep seated during the experience. The banjo rattling away in full spate now. “Lilly of the Glade,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Mister, Give Me a Bob.”

Anyone could foretell the notice the day would get in the Argus: “A gleeful party of cricketers, spectators and their families departed the Central Wharf at 8:30 in the morning.”

Ernie Malcolm came wandering down towards the taffrail in his very sporty light-blue suit. His tie was undone, his eyes lively. You wondered what it meant. That the Humane Society had not yet told him to cease being a fool. Or that they’d said yes to him, had agreed, and had false honours in store for Timothy Shea, storekeeper, Belgrave Street, Kempsey, and a number of others.

Terara shuddered and set itself against the current, gentle though it was today. The old tub eked its way around the new curve the river had taken in ’92, when it had shown them all its easy, unanswerable force.

Tim took off his coat and let the expansive surroundings influence him.

Rich pastures on the western side. Euroka, where dairy farmers lived, rich and poor, with some of them taking occasional recourse to cattle-duffing. They thought they were remote from police scrutiny, those people, since the river had chosen to set a barrier between them and the law. Lavender mountains ran forever to the north behind those emerald mudflats.

Aboard, young men were earnestly drinking now. Tim hoped they were the Singles batsmen blurring their sight. “I can hit drunk, balls other fellers can’t hit sober!” Marriage would educate them on what their limits were.

“The willows,” said Kitty, pointing to the shoreline from her chair. “They are so lovely. No wonder the Chinamen put them on their plates.”

Both to port and starboard river mullet leapt. “Fish leppin’ out of the rivers at you there,” an old man had told Tim before emigration. Old fool had never seen Australia, but had been right by either accident or vision. If his own father could see this—the spacious sky, the violet mountains, the potent river enriched with fertile silt—he’d be reconciled to the loss of children. Raucous little Red Kenna would be pleased to yield up three daughters to such a splendid place.

The great hill of West Kempsey bore up. It looked so wooded that an uninformed traveller wouldn’t know there were houses and graves, a hospital and Greenhill blackfellers’ camp up there.

“D’you know, we could be explorers,” said Kitty.

He reached his hand to her shoulder. “You would be the first child-carrying explorer there was.”

She laughed that quick chuckle.

“Shea, you’ll find me telling people that you’ve got this sense of humour. But you don’t do it when others are around.”

“I do it,” said Tim, “for Bandy Habash when I’m telling him to get to buggery!”

“So, there you are. It takes love or anger.”

She stood up urgently and grabbed his arm.

“My God, Tim. What’s that little ruffian doing?”

As Kitty had, he looked to the stern and was at once appalled. Johnny in his knee pants and Lucy Rochester in her muslin dress. Both barefoot, they had climbed up on the taffrail and were standing on the stern looking down into the river. You could see their bodies jolting with every shudder of Terara. They had this air of having decided to do it by spontaneous mental messages, without any words passing between them. All they had to keep them in place was a hand each attached to the flag pole which rose up the middle of the railing. They were staring down into the wonderful surf of Terara’s wake.

“Get down from there!” he yelled, sounding predictable to himself and therefore negligible to the brats on the railing. Others were moving towards the children too, a couple of the young Singles team who made amused noises. It seemed to him that Lucy and Johnny jumped by common and wilful consent, but again without words. His son and Lucy were simply gone in an instant. The Singles cricketers screamed, “Children overboard!”

Kitty stood behind Tim gasping and crying out in terror. Tim knew that the playful Singles were no use to him, nor overdressed Ernie. A simple and dreadful thing to act. Rushing aft, he climbed the taffrail and launched himself, sandshoes first, into the turbulence behind Terara, where the children could be seen bobbing and apparently enjoying themselves.

He was no more than a social swimmer, he remembered on the way down. He’d have swum a few strokes at a beach in Capetown and another few in Ceylon. He’d swum sometimes in the creek at Crescent Head and, observing the style of Wooderson, in the river. Then during the great floods, small distances, down Belgrave Street, from the dinghy to a given rooftop say, from one hotel upstairs verandah to another, or to put a rope on an item of floating furniture. Assisting Wooderson who was the sublime, unbeatable swimmer. Now here he was going alone into the ferment of water behind Terara.

Before Tim’s white shoes broke the tumbled surface, he confusedly saw Johnny swimming free of the wake with short choppy strokes. But Lucy on her back, her pinafore blossoming, flapping casually at the water with her hands.

A shock to hit the river and go down into that dark, bubbling mess and get at once the tang of mud on your tongue and the pinching fullness of water in your nose. And so long under, yearning for the fall to cease, for the ascent to light. And who bloody said the ascent was to happen, who guaranteed he would rise? Was it physics or just occasional good luck that brought people up for a last look at a known world?

Keep your mouth shut, you silly bugger.

Dark water choked him. But he came up and while biting off his first breath found the recovered universe busy as blazes. Terara, more massive than he ever believed it to be, was turned abeam of him. He watched Jim Wooderson commence a lovely swallow dive from amidships. The captain shouting through a bullhorn. “All wait where you are! Help at hand! Help at hand!” Lifebuoys came arching through the air.

Johnny swam towards Tim as he stayed upright, pedalling in the water, dragging himself along, using his arms as oars. Johnny, bush humourist as he was, began imitating him. Or perhaps it was honest filial imitation. Who had time to tell?

“What are you at?” Tim asked the boy, and the boy actually scooped water up and pushed it towards Tim and had leisure to laugh.

There was a rope within grabbing distance and they both grabbed it. Aboard, he could see even from water level, a crewman and some of the cricketers took energetic hold, and someone shouted, “Willing Hands!” The slight speed of the boat combined with the vigour of the men on the rope meant that Tim and Johnny were hauled through the water more speedily than Tim would have liked. The river had settled though, and Tim could see that Jim Wooderson had meanwhile swum to the girl, who still gave every sign of enjoying her floating exercises.

“I’m going to give you something when we’re aboard!” Tim cried to his son. The captain was letting down a ladder, and the hauled rope brought Tim and Johnny to its base. Johnny leapt from the water and was up it, deft as something inhuman. As Tim pulled himself out of the river and up the rungs, leaving the water and becoming heavy, the full weight of his shock returned to him. He had to pause halfway up and then continue after deep breaths, but when he reached the top, a dozen hands pulled him over the steely rim of the ship, and two dozen others tried to. There was applause and whistles. “Don’t go hard on the boy, Tim!” people called.

In the water, Jim Wooderson was dragging the girl along with great brave strokes of his big, fast-bowler arms. No nonsense from Lucy. She was coming quietly. Tim turned and reached out to cuff Johnny’s ear and someone put a beer in his hand. Yes, he thought, delightful. He drank. Wonderful. Kitty was there to cuff and shake the boy anyhow. Then she clung to Tim and looked up at him. There was such terror in her little peasant pan of a face.

She said, “That bloody Lucy. What in the name of all holy is she about?”

“I will find out,” said Tim softly in her ear.

“Thank Christ I didn’t let her into the house!”

After drinking, he no longer had the breath to tell her, “That might be why she did it.”

On top of the bluff at Toorooka, some local cricketers had mown the grass and raised a bit of a tent. People had placed a chair solicitously for Mrs. Kitty Shea in the shade at the edge of the field. Fearful maybe that her shock might cause a premature birth. The children sat at her feet, Annie without having to be ordered to do it, Johnny and Lucy in their silt-stiff, drying picnic clothes. Under the severest orders of the entire company not to move.

“Of course, I’ll bloody play,” Tim had to keep reassuring the group. Wooderson, wrapped in a fresh shirt and someone’s huge towel, was already twirling the bat in his hand, playing strokes at phantom balls. Since he was an utter tower of a fellow, no one asked him was he fit to play.

Tim himself wore a jacket and trousers. His shirt was drying, laid out on the grass. He’d lost a sandshoe to the river. A fresh pair from Savage’s. Three and sixpence worth. He would have to field and bat barefoot.

He’d taken Lucy aside after they had landed at the bottom of the lane which led up to the cricket pitch. Young men, singing, carried the blanco-ed bag of cricket gear past them.

“Tell me why you’d try to drown my son?”

“No,” she said, looking calmly down the hill at the river. “No, I didn’t try it. He wanted to jump. I jumped with him.”

“No, you’re older, miss. What did you tell him to get him up on the rail? You say nothing to me. What did you tell him?”

“He went up there. I went up there too.”

“Him first?”

“Yes. It was being like the birds.”

“I don’t believe you, that he went up before you.”

“No,” she said. “Him first.”

There was a small flexing of the mouth and her eyes filled, but only a moistening. No bawling from flinty little Lucy.

“And you jumped? I saw that. You jumped exactly together. Why?”

“Men screamed at us. That’s why we jumped.”

God, men had screamed.

“Mother Imelda might hear of this.”

She said nothing.

“Tell me straight,” he asked, pursuing old suspicions. “Are you happy at the nuns?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I killed your father? I didn’t kill your father, you know. I carried him to hospital. He had already gone. Do you understand?”

She looked straight back at him. No evasion in the eyes. She was the most astounding child, nor could she be reached.

“Thank you for bringing me the condensed milk,” she said, her eyes creasing against the light. “It’s lovely in the tea.”

“Well, any more fuss with water, and that’ll be the stony end of condensed milk. Will you for sweet Christ’s sake please tell me are you happy? Are you at peace?”

He lay at the centre of a universe of women who generally went less than satisfied. Particularly this one. Particularly Missy. The others, kindlier stars, smiled on him.

“I like it when you bring me chocolate too,” she said.

“And the nuns let you keep it?”

“Yes.”

“And they don’t make you say the Hail Mary.”

“Only if I want.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel her tiny bones there.

“So no one wishes you any harm. Don’t try to drown my son.”

“No,” she said. “But he does it on his own too.”

“I can scare him out of it. But don’t you betray me, Lucy.”

“No,” she said. She still went on looking west. Towards the smokier reaches of the Macleay.

In the centre of the mown sward, Wooderson and Curnow were tossing for the right to bat first, while the last of the Singles were breasting the hill carrying a keg jovially between them. Players in white flannel pants, held up by striped ties worn as belts, were pacing out a twenty-two-yard pitch in the middle of the mown space and then hammering in the three stumps and setting the bails atop them. This scene gave Tim a sense of event, and for the first time it struck him intimately that he would have within an hour or so to face some ferocious young bowler, defend his wicket and try to score runs.

“Marrieds are batting,” cried Wooderson, strolling back towards the shade where Kitty and Mrs. Malcolm sat, though not exactly together. With them, all the docile children, including the temporarily docile Lucy and Johnny. Two tall young dairy farmers, each with a pad on his left leg and bat in hand, were stroking at imaginary balls. The Marrieds’ openers, blocking, sweeping, pushing away. Were these two boys really old enough to be married? Men were leaning over the scorer’s chair, wanting to see where Wooderson had put them in the batting order. Tim sauntered across. Someone said, “You’re fourth wicket down, Tim. Give your clothes time to dry out. Unless all the other buggers get ducks.”

Everyone, the women too, concentrated on the tall, dark-haired young Aldavilla farmer who would open the bowling for the Singles. He stood near the stumps at the northern end of the paddock, swinging his giant arm in its big shoulder. You could see the machinery of all this shoulder-exercise working under his shirt. Curnow the bank clerk placed his fieldsmen wide of the wicket. In the spirit of the day, he expected lots of flaying of the ball, hoiks and hooks and spoonings-up. Slashes high and wide.

The first ball from the fast bowler wasn’t hit at all. It went through to the wicket-keeper who fumbled with his gloves and managed to stop it. But the next ball, the young Married farmer hit straight down the wicket past the bowler, and the runs began. The cricket match was thus initiated, and everyone relaxed and began to talk and by and large ignore the progress of the game. Such was the strange rite of cricket.

On his blanket, Tim sat like a child by Kitty’s chair. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you well, darling?” she asked.

“Perfectly so,” he assured her.

He wished the others would stop fussing, but he liked it in her, the plump hand on his shoulder by which she reassured herself of his substance.

She gave out a little stutter of laughter. “Can’t that little ruffian swim though?” She nodded towards Johnny. “An utter water rat. In his bath, I look between his toes for the webs, you know.”

She laughed. She’d really tickled herself with this image of her son as a water animal.

He was going to tell her to watch the bony little girl while he was batting, but the picture of Lucy paddling backwards, buoyed by air trapped in her pinafore, rose and was all at once too pitiable to be spoken about.

Kitty said, “Might as well get all the surprises over in one bundle. I’ve come to the conclusion—I’d like to go and meet Mamie in Sydney.”

For a time he felt ambushed, but then he said, “In your state?”

“I’m never stronger than when carrying,” she said. “I would be gone five days. Bring Mamie back with me on Burrawong, you see.”

“Dear Jesus,’ he murmured. “It’s a rat tub, that Burrawong.” He could see Missy approaching her at the railing as, plump and defenceless, she faced both New Zealand and infinity. “You’d have to travel saloon, and we can’t afford it.”

She said dreamily, “Well, we can only afford to send the children of strangers to bloody old Imelda. And who says saloon? Everyone sleeps on deck anyhow, this time of year.”

“Sleeping on deck is fine if you’re seventeen and there’s no storm. What if you’re seasick up in that fo’c’sle with the rats and the drunks?”

“Then I’ll know it’ll end in two and a half days. Two and a half days’ misery never hurt anyone.”

“Forty-five bob return in saloon.”

Kitty winked at him. “Oh, dear God, he’s suddenly got the gift to count money!”

“Think, Kitty. In violent weather you could miscarry.”

“Not this one! This one’s like Annie! Not like the water rat. This one sticks with Mama.”

There was a yell from the field. One of the batsmen had failed to connect cleanly, and the ball had risen lazily and was falling slowly towards the hand of the Singles fielder at square leg. There was some hope that he may have drunk too much from the keg, but no, he held the ball secure and raised it above his head. Mr. Malcolm, who was acting as umpire at the bowler’s end, dramatically signalled out.

The man in the straw hat who was doing the scoring cried out to the people who were sitting in the shade. “One wicket for fourteen. The rot has set in.”

Tim had seen few of the recent runs scored. His mind had been taken up with images of the Burrawong out on the Pacific, with over-bright days at sea, stormy nights.

“Ellen Burke will look to the children if you agree,” said Kitty. “It’s been arranged.”

“Jesus, I thought all that tittering the other day stood for something.”

“She’s staying on in town. Old Burke’s in a mood to afford that now he’s won the case. You get on well enough with Ellen Burke, don’t you now?”

“Will you be safe though? Those Walsh Bay wharves… Darling Harbour?”

“Dear Lord, observe the wonder! His concern for his little wife!”

She put her hand to his shoulder again. If they had not been in public, he would have kissed it for fear of losing it. Even though her gesture was purest irony.

“Dear God,” he said, “it looks like I can’t hammer you in place.”

Out in the field, another hopeful batsman was caught out swiping.

“Here we go,” said Wooderson, the incoming batsman. He would hold the bowling attack. But what am I doing here, an Irishman playing an English game in so far off a place, listening to my wife propose the Burrawong?

He saw Ernie Malcolm surrender his umpiring job to a farmer. Ernie advanced towards the keg, rubbing his dry lips. A confession of a sizable thirst. Very soon, Ernie—glass of ale in hand—came and squatted near Tim and Kitty. The accountant hunched by the storekeeper! If only this were business. Ernie took a long pull on the savagely needed glass of beer. To look at his pruney face made Tim understand how hot it was out on the field.

“Tim,” said Ernie, panting. “I have to tell you that what I saw this morning confirms me in my opinion as much as what I heard before. As to your quality as a man. Your unquestioning response. Straight over the rail and into the river!”

“For Jesus’ sake, Ernie, it was my son in the river.”

“No hesitation, Tim.”

Tim said helplessly, “It should not be counted in with the other matter. And as you saw, I might as well have stayed on deck. The boy had already saved himself. Treading water easier than me.”

“I would anticipate,” said Ernie, dragging in another huge mouthful of ale and managing to get it down, “that you would say such a thing. When bravery is habitual, the hero cannot understand what other people see in it.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Tim. Bugger clientele like Ernie!

“Tim, you are a credit to your kind. It is a mark of the new country, where one citizen has as much at stake in the society as the next, that valour should gradually become universal. The point we want to emphasise as the Macleay is spanned later this year. And you have proven the point.”

Tim had taken enough. His son in the river, his wife going to sea, and these further unwelcome accusations of gallantry.

Ernie chose to laugh and to jostle Tim’s shoulder.

“Well, you’re a remarkable fellow, Tim, and I see your gallantry in that vigorous Australian son of yours.”

Then he grew pensive.

“I’ve noted Wooderson’s bravery. There’s a fellow. He’ll be in my correspondence too.”

Ask him about Missy, said an impulse in Tim. If he’s such a letter-writer. So public-spirited. A letter from him on accounting stationery, and the Commissioner would sit up.

But he couldn’t manage it in time. Johnny and other boys ran past and distracted Ernie. He took Tim’s elbow and grew solemn. “Mrs. Malcolm and I cannot achieve any such reflection of ourselves. Problems, you see… This is why I like to think of myself as being related to the entire civis of the Macleay. And, of course, not only the valley. My organisations. These are some of the means by which a life of a childless man is fulfilled, Mr. Shea.”

“And by umpiring cricket matches,” suggested Tim, for the sake of good humour.

“That also,” Mr. Malcolm assented, and as he did so a third wicket fell to the Singles’ rangy fast bowler. Someone brought a cricket pad to Tim.

“Better put that on, Tim.”

Wooderson was out there at the moment. An athlete from his mother’s womb. He traipsed down the wicket to play their slower bowler on the full. Whack! The red pellet came singing like a wasp towards the wives, and there were cries of alarm and then clapping. The little red orb sizzled in amongst the picnic baskets but rolled away into long grass.

“Stroke!” called Ernie Malcolm by way of applause. “How much now, scorer?”

“Wooderson 47 not out, MacKenzie 29 not out. Three wickets for 123.”

Ernie Malcolm whistled. “Fast scoring!”

Tim hadn’t noticed most of Wooderson’s rapid earning of runs.

But then MacKenzie slashed at square leg and Curnow caught him.

“You’re in there, Tim.”

Tim rose, barefoot, a pad on one leg.

“There you go now, Tim,” Kitty whispered. How strange to advance towards the centre of the mown area. A sort of electric otherness to it, of being outside yourself. The kind of actor you were in your dreams of the theatre. Unsure of your lines. MacKenzie coming towards you yields up the bat, its handle clammy. “I went too much for the slash, Tim! Should have been more careful.”

“Here he is!” yelled one of the inner fieldsmen joyfully, as if they expected Tim to be easy game. An edge to what the boy said too. Here comes a tyke, an Irishman, a Papist. No good at honest British games. But Tim decided to be jovial, a mere batsman and not a token of divine debate.

“I want some mullygrubbers, thank you, boys!” he called, to show that he could face his fate with irony. “Right along the ground if you don’t mind.”

His fellow batsman Wooderson came up to Tim’s end of the wicket. “If we can have twenty-five runs from you, then I think it’ll be dead easy. Get ’em well and truly pissed at lunchtime. They won’t see our bowlers on this pitch.”

At the stumps, Tim went through the ritual he’d seen other men engage in at cricket matches, moving his bat about on the crease until the umpire at the bowler’s end assured him that it now covered his middle stump. He settled into a stance copied from cricketers’ pictures in the Sydney Mail. The big dairy farmer-cum-bowler thundered in, and the faces on the fielders became intent, their hands stretched out to take a catch. He thought he saw the ball coming and made a swipe, but there was no connection. The ball went through to the keeper. Some of the fieldsmen whistled to show how close it had been to the wicket. Tim hated that whistle, the idea of his coming victimhood that went with it.

“Watch the bloody thing, Tim,” he told himself aloud.

The big bugger running in again. But on to it this time. Whack! The vibration from the willow bat up into the arms. The ball rising up to the left of him and towards the river. Flying down past mid-bloody-glorious-wicket! Wooderson has already begun running, and Tim starts too. They are co-conspirators as in the flood of ’92.

One of the men who whistled when I missed the last ball is chasing like buggery after it. Yes, turn and run again. Wooderson is. Bloody bindi-eye sticking in my bare foot. Damn the thing. Cast not your seed on barren ground for the tares and thistles will rise up and cripple the Jesus out of you!

The over ended, and he had time to stand by his wicket and feel like a man in possession. What must Kitty think of him? Diving in the river before ten o’clock. Defending his stumps at noon. A gentleman batsman, three not out.

He bent and picked the bindi-eye out of his foot. A small irritant. He hoped that his son the river rat was watching. This was how you behaved. You were nonchalant between threats.

The other bowler now, not as tall as the dairy farmer, came in and bowled to Wooderson, who gave the ball a little nudge into the covers, and the two of them ran one—another bloody bindi-eye in the pad of his foot. Tim facing the bowler again. Medium speed. Oh, he span the ball, but that was all right. Tim could not read fast bowling, but he could read a spinning ball. Again the beautiful contact. In the arms, the sweet echo of a full-bladed hit.

The ball had disappeared around the back of the wicket—to the field position they called deep fine leg. Square leg umpire was signalling four runs. This makes me a bloody citizen, Tim thought. He and Wooderson didn’t even have to move. Dear God, he had the sudden eminence of a man now seven not out. Batting amongst the furtherest English. The English of New South Wales. Batting at their best game. Seven not out!

Next ball he didn’t hit clean. It dribbled off the bat. But Wooderson thought they should run, and so he and Tim were running. One run. And the pressure off him.

Wooderson in command of the bowler, and the bowler seemed to know it and bowl in a defeated way. Way out across the mown grass the red ball flew. One hop, two hops. Into the wilderness. Four more runs. Applaud at your end by knocking the palm of your left hand casually with the bat held in your right.

Another Wooderson slice then. A run in it. The tares and bindi-eyes were a distant rumour in his flesh. He and Wooderson casually crossed in mid-pitch and changed ends. The cavalry of cricket. The mounted bloody bushmen.

A fat young man, Tim noticed, had begun supplying glasses of beer to the outer fringe of fielders. Accepting the amber glasses, the fielders laughed, but each had to put his glass down as Tim knocked the ball off through square leg again. Set the bloody Singles running with froth on their mouths to cut off the ball. A poor throw-back from a beer-blurred Single. He and Wooderson ran three. “Seeing them, Tim!” Wooderson called to him in commendation as they passed each other in the middle of the wicket.

The sun had started to burn his scalp through his flannel hat. The Macleay partook of the same latitude as did parts of Africa, and the sun had an African sort of bite. Tim was delirious for lack of breath. The tall dairy farmer came on and bowled again, but both he and Wooderson had their eye in now and kept cracking him away for runs.

The medium pacer back on, Tim sent the ball off untrammelled and high in the direction of the river.

But one of the Singles, a wholesome teetotal boy perhaps, who had not been vitiated by the beer, was running for the ball like a terrier. He had an appointment with that ball and Wooderson kept running, and Tim had his back to the boy when he heard the scream of triumph, and over his shoulder saw that the boy was flat on his back holding up in one hand the safely taken catch. Tim was exceptionally out. Patting his left hand with the blade of his bat, Wooderson applauded him as he left the paddock. Johnny came running towards him. “Dada, you scored thirty-seven runs.” The boy stood on his hands and remained like that for a time. A sign that he had all his unruliness back and would need to be watched.

Approaching Kitty, Tim could hear the patter of applause from wives and spectators. He yielded up his sweaty bat to the next batsman in, who said, “Can’t match you, Tim.”

“Here he is,” called Kitty to him. He noticed she had a glass of stout sitting thickly by her chair. Ideal for expectant and nursing mothers… Deep in the shade he saw pale Mrs. Malcolm clapping, though in a distracted way. As he knelt to unclasp the pad on his right leg, he saw his large white feet stained with grass and dirt. He wished he’d been wearing shoes for his cricketing performance. The river, by taking one of his new canvas shoes, had rendered him into a yokel.

“Sturdy chap, Tim!” called Ernie Malcolm. As if a score of 37 runs confirmed everything he’d ever known.

Someone put some warm ale into his hand, and as he drank it down he felt its amber pressure in his bladder. He waved to Kitty, and then off to the bushes for one of the great male delights. The open air piddle. A lion of cricket marking the open ground. Knees bent. Looking up at the rugged filigree tops of eucalypts. And 37 runs. Bugger me! Wondrous number.

In returning to Kitty he passed the keg. Two young men were standing there. One of them held his ale glass in his left hand, and in his right had raised up for viewing by himself and his friend a photograph of a young woman. One of those photographs taken by what they flashly called a studio. The photo was stiffly backed in cardboard. Passing behind them, Tim had no reason not to glance at it. The endless fascination of the twinning of souls. This kind of photograph commonly celebrated in photographic studies with the photographer’s name and address embossed on the edge of the object of desire and tenderness.

So he glanced. And oh Jesus it was Missy. Quite clearly so. Missy with her throat and shoulders shown off by a summer blouse. She stared indirectly at the viewer. Her head was turned down towards the bottom corner of the photograph, but her eyes held the centre of his gaze.

“What is this?” he asked the young man urgently. They turned to him, but the one with the photograph did not lower it.

“A dear friend of mine,” said the young man holding the photograph.

“Dear God,” said Tim. “Do you not bloody know…?”

“Know what?” asked the young man.

Tim’s face felt insanely hot. The sun had burned him by its massive stealth, and he was aware of the fact now.

“What is her name?” he asked the young man. “What is her name?”

The young man winked at his mate.

“Afraid she’s spoken for, Tim,” said the mate.

“For God’s sake, don’t play around. Give her name!”

“Go to hell, Tim,” said the boy with the photograph, lowering it now.

“Don’t you know?” asked Tim. “Don’t you even know that Constable Hanney is riding around with her head in a bottle?”

The first young man, the owner of the photograph, stepped forward.

“What’re you saying? What sort of bloody insult is that?”

“The sun’s got to him,” said the second young man, holding back his friend.

“Bloody hope so!” said the first one. He had however decided now not to attack Tim. He was looking around for his blazer to put the photograph away in it. Tim stepped out though and grabbed him by the arm. “For dear Christ’s sake, son, give me her name.”

“Miss Millie Holmes,” the young man yelled at him. “Miss Millie Holmes of Summer Island. Not in any bloody bottle, I can tell you, and I resent the idea like blazes.”

To prove the point, the young man ran at Tim and pushed him away. Trying to keep balance, Tim found he had no legs. He fell hard on his back under a bare, blue, circling sky. He saw the young man’s face swing like an errant star across his vision, and felt in his skull the urgent tread of many people on the earth close by. Wooderson’s voice crying, “Hold hard there!”

“Bloody disgrace, bloody disgrace,” he heard the friend of Millie Holmes say. A man’s voice asked, “Has he been drinking?” Kitty’s face and Wooderson’s swung into his vision, both massive. Welcome stars descended.

“It’s shock,” said Wooderson.

“And the heat,” said Kitty. “Poor Tim. Get him up, will you?” Of course Kitty could not bend forward. Wooderson could, and helped sit him up.

“He was ranting on about Millie Holmes,” Millie’s admirer’s well-liquored, easily-angered mate said. But he sounded uncertain.

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” Wooderson told the tipsy boy, and Kitty from her lesser height made soothing noises with her lips. Mrs. Malcolm had appeared with a glass of lemonade, and she was able to bend also. Tim was very careful to make all these observations, comparisons and calculations about people’s movements. He wasn’t sure which pieces of knowledge would be of help to him later. “Mr. Shea,” Mrs. Malcolm said in her lovely, serious, fey manner. “I knew this morning would prove altogether too much for you.”

Tennyson’s Maude. “On either side the river lie,” Tim told her, “long fields of barley and of rye.”

“Well, that is correct,” said Mrs. Malcolm, but Tim could tell she didn’t get the message.

Wooderson on his haunches now right beside him.

“Ask them please to show me the girl’s photograph,” Tim pleaded with Wooderson.

“Why, dear, do you want to see it?” murmured Kitty over Wooderson’s shoulder. She was frowning, and fearful too. She spoke softly. “Who do you think it is?”

“It’s Hanney’s Missy,” he told her. He had begun to shudder. He was fevered.

“That’s sunstroke talking,” said Wooderson to Kitty.

Kitty walked straight to the young man who owned the photograph.

“Let my husband see the picture,” she said commandingly. “Come on, give the thing up! He’s not going to eat it.”

And the boy did, defeated by little Kitty, who brought it over and lowered it towards Tim and said, “There!”

But when Tim inspected it the photograph had changed to something normal. All the lightning had gone from it. He saw there an altered, ordinary young woman who would see old age. A woman with an ordered life ahead. It could be told just by looking at her that she would not be hauled around the country by a bewildered constable. Hard for Tim to know now how the mistake had been made.

“I’m sorry,” he told Kitty, shivering. “I made an awful mistake. I’m sorry.”

Wooderson said. “No, don’t give it a thought. It’s heat prostration and the shock.”

“He’s sensitive to these things,” Kitty explained to Wooderson and Mrs. Malcolm. “To a fault, you know. Too much of a poet.”

Tim saw Winnie Malcolm’s rose-pink lips purse, going along with Kitty’s judgment.

The young admirer received his photograph back from Kitty, and went and put it away in his jacket with scarcely any show of grievance.

Someone—not Kitty—brought a cushion for Tim’s head. Perhaps it was Mrs. Malcolm again, but he could not be sure.

“No need for you to field, Tim,” said Wooderson. “You’ve done the brave task with your batting.”

Tim lay back on the utterly comfortable earth now of New South Wales. People drifted away from him, as if from a kind of respect. He felt very much at one with this ground, with the way it harboured him beneath branches.

“There’s been surprises, eh?” he heard Kitty say, the words trailing over his face like fingers. “But it’s sweet here. Take a rest, Mr. Shea.”

He drowsed. Of course, he’d made a fool of himself and been punished for inaction by Missy. Yet under the sun, she receded from his mind now. The whole farce of it, her face jumping out at him from a usual photo. But chastised now, he could have a licensed break in the shade. His wife beside him, hands folded, in a canvas chair she’d dragged over for the sake of being near.

Jesus, he and Kitty would rest here in the absolute end as well. This fact struck him for the first intimate time. No going back to reclaim soggier ground in Duhallow. This was the earth which would take them. And they would feed this ground. He lay close down to it, and it seemed to him to yield slightly as if it were in on the realisation too.

“Mother of God,” Kitty told him after a time. “They are having a tossing-the-ball-at-the-stumps contest out there. And that bloody scamp Johnny’s involved. Crikey, he has an arm on him! Where did he get that from?”

And she recounted to him as it happened, how their son kept hitting the wicket from all angles and from thirty yards out, then forty yards out. The men were whistling Johnny for his sure eye. He and some great lump of a farmer were left in the contest at the end, and the farmer won. But it seemed to Tim that Johnny had made a claim on things, on Australia itself, with his true eye. As he himself now made the same claim by his tranquil lying-down, his New South Wales holiday in the shade.

“Couldn’t you just see him playing the toff’s game? That Johnny. Wearing creams. You know, I won’t be going on Burrawong unless you’re well.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Of course I’m bloody well, and you’ll travel saloon. And your sister too.”

Mamie Kenna travelling saloon. Poshly into the valley of plenty.