Remembering Babylon (17 page)

‘Our asparagus, this year,’ Mr Herbert announces at another point, and the colour comes to his cheek, ‘is quite special. People told us, you know, that it couldn’t be done. Too damp. But there it is.’

‘And the strawberries,’ says Lady Bowen, darting a quick glance at Sir George who has put his knife and fork down, drawn himself up and is smouldering. ‘The children had never
seen strawberries – actually
growing
. Peeping out under their little – leaves.’

This talk of fruit and vegetables, especially in the tension it seems to create, unnerves Mr Frazer. It is intended, he believes, to make way for his report. He waits for Sir George now to take up what Lady Bowen has so skilfully prepared, and wonders when he does not if
he
should do it. Surely not. Then it occurs to him that he has mistaken things altogether. Sir George finds this talk of gardens and strawberries and asparagus suspicious, sinister even – is that it? A way of informing him, indirectly (in which case it would be Mr Herbert’s business Lady Bowen has been doing), that his interest in the native fruit scheme is known and that if he wants to save himself from absolute folly, he had better pull out while he can. Sir George’s anxiety, Mr Frazer sees, is that he may speak out and embarrass him.

So the litany of Herston’s splendours goes on from grapes and China peaches to its mouse deer, its Breton cows, its Arabian bull, its peacocks, pheasants, guinea pigs, and, after a strained half hour of port, they retire at last to the sitting room. Here Lady Bowen, in a sweet Italian voice and with a delicate touch on the keys, sings from the sheet music Mr Herbert has brought, while Skip, at his master’s feet, looks on, and coffee is brought, and they settle into a cosy torpor in which Mr Frazer fears he may doze off.

Suddenly there is an explosion in the room. Lady Bowen has slapped her forearm. A smudge of crimson appears there, the rich blood of the Candianos, which she stares at a moment – they all do – as if she had not expected it to be quite so scarlet or so abundant. She rises and leaves the room.

Clouds of mosquitos have drifted in from the mangroves downriver – the price of the cooling breeze that has sprung up – and go sailing by with their fine legs hanging. When Lady Bowen returns the blood is gone and she has a servant with her who bears in each hand a lighted coil of some sharp smelling stuff (dried cow-manure, Mr Frazer guesses) that he sets on the floor, and from which thin smoke weaves upward and spreads.

From Sir George’s reproachful look as he takes his leave, Mr Frazer guesses that he has in some way offended. He has failed to play some role he was assigned here, which he was not clever enough, or socially adroit enough, to perceive. Or he has been too responsive to Mr Herbert; whom he finds rather attractive on the whole, very manly and unassuming and, at one moment, when he took the opportunity, perhaps foolishly, to speak of Gemmy – whose name Mr Herbert already knew – very attentive and sympathetic. Sir George has seen it and sniffed out a defection, a choice of loyalties. Anyway, next morning, at Marr’s, there is a note.

It is from the Premier and is in two parts. The first thanks him, mysteriously, for his ‘understanding’ on the previous evening. ‘I was – I presume here on your confidence – very grateful for that, as I daresay was our hostess, though I speak, of course, only for myself …’

And the second?

‘I have, after our brief conversation, been considering what might be done for Mr Fairley, whose position, I believe, was your chief reason for coming to us. I have pleasure in informing you that I have arranged for him to be offered the post of Customs Officer at the port of Bowen, at a salary of fifty pounds per annum, the official notification of which, etc, etc.’

He was astonished. Had he made himself so unclear? Was it a return for his ‘understanding’ of a situation he had not understood? Was it a joke whose humour he was expected to recognise – at the expense, perhaps, of Sir George? Was it cynicism? Was it large-handed indifference? Anyway, it was what he took back with him.

The orchards he had foreseen receded into a future that appeared increasingly remote but no more unreal to him than the place he now stood in, with the Premier’s letter in his hand, the jug and basin with their nasturtium pattern, sitting solidly on the washstand, and the busy little capital coming to life beyond the sill, all its picket fences gleaming, the relentless sunlight bouncing off its domes.

A
DAY OF BUSHFIRES
, brassy sky; the air stilled, smelling of char. Fine ash falling, as if the sun at last had burnt itself out and the last flakes of it were descending to cover the earth. It did not surprise him. He too felt burnt out, his skull a husk, paper-thin and rattling as he walked. He felt, as he followed the white ribbon that led to the settlement, that he had lost all weight in the world; his feet made so little impression in the dust that it was as if he had not passed, or had passed through into another being and no longer shared – with the powdery dust under his feet, the rocks, the trees along the way where he paused a moment to rest and, settling his palm against a tree trunk, felt the sap streaming up from where the giant tree was rooted – the hold these things had on the earth. He shuffled. He tottered. His tongue felt brittle in his mouth as an insect’s wing. He was going to claim back his life; to find the sheets of paper where all that had happened to him had been set down in the black blood that had so much power over his own: the events, things, people too, that sprang to life in them, Willett’s boots, the ferrets, Mosey and The Irish. Magicked into squiggles, like the ghosts of insects under bark, they had drawn the last of his spirit from him. They were drawing him to his death.

George Abbot, at his desk in the schoolroom, had a pile of papers before him and a pen in his hand. More lives, Gemmy thought, that out there somewhere held others in their spell.

He seemed a different figure, this man in his shirtsleeves with his shirt open and the pen in his hand, from the youth he sometimes saw at the kitchen table. He was in his role here of
sorcerer. He felt the power of that in him even at Mrs Hutchence’s, where he was called George. He was not what he seemed.

He recalled the old harshness with which, in the days when he had followed Lachlan and the girls to school, the man had driven him away. He had smelled on him then an aversion that came from the blood, and was not convinced by the familiarity he had begun to show him or the attempts he made at kindness. It was not done for his benefit – or so he thought – but to impress Leona.

A man may have two natures. Here at his desk the schoolteacher was in the other darker and more powerful one, seated before a pile of papers, with at his elbow the bottle with the spirit that smelled of earth.

George Abbot, looking up from his tedious corrections, was surprised to see Gemmy at the window. He was startled. How long had he been there? He felt a kind of goosepimpling at the intensity of his look. The fellow seemed sick, out of himself. He got up quickly and helped him in.

It took him a little time to understand what he wanted. His garbled speech, all stutters, made no sense, and he thought at first he must be delirious. He was asking for people George had never heard of, or so he thought, till one name, Willett, struck him, and he remembered some bit of what, nearly a year ago, he had set down, and in this very room too. It was then that he grasped it. He wanted
that
– that piece of writing. He wanted it back. Well he did not have it, of course. Mr Frazer did. Mr Frazer was in Brisbane.

‘This, Gemmy?’ he asked, holding up one of the exercises he had been correcting.

Gemmy, looking rather sly, reached out and, not quite grasping, relieved him of it. George was surprised at himself. At the ease with which he let it go.

Gemmy raised the sheet to his nostrils and sniffed, and a look George Abbot could not have defined, but would never forget, spread over his features. He waited in expectation, and George, more out of curiosity than anything else, or to see the look again, offered him a second sheet, then another,
till seven of the ill-written exercises, all blotches and scratchings out, had passed from his hand to Gemmy’s.

‘What do you want them for?’ he asked.

Gemmy looked at him gravely and did not reply. He slipped the papers into his pocket and George, inwardly, shrugged. Useless, he decided, to demand them back.

‘You should go home now, Gemmy,’ he said gently. ‘They’ll be worrying about you. Do you want me to come with you?’

He shook his head, and began, alarmed perhaps, to get up, but tottered.

‘Here, let me get you something,’ he said. ‘A slice of bread – some water.’

The man sat again and he went quickly into the little room behind the blackboard and cut a thick slice of bread, poured a mug of water. He was only gone a moment. But when he came back to the schoolroom, with the plate in one hand and the mug in the other, Gemmy was gone. Puzzled, he set the bread and water down, and went back to his corrections – or what remained of them. What would he tell Jeff Murcutt and the rest, whose exercises, sweated over in the narrow desks, turned this way and that to get a better purchase on the paper, grimed with dirt, smeared with ink, filled painfully with what he had knocked into their skulls, he had allowed Gemmy – just like that – to walk off with.

Since he had begun to love but also to forget himself a little, the world and everything around him appeared in a new light. He regarded Gemmy very differently now from when he had sat at the table here, an unwilling schoolboy, and taken down the ‘facts’ Mr Frazer dictated. Gemmy had repelled him then. Something in the muddiness of his eye, the meaty stench he gave off, a filth, ingrained, ineradicable perhaps – most of all in his cringing eagerness to please, had challenged his belief that suffering, even of the most degrading sort, would bring out the best in a man, and that the spectacle of it must inspire noble sentiments. Well, no noble sentiments had come to him when he was faced with Gemmy. If what had survived in this brutish specimen was, as Mr Frazer appeared to believe, naked essential humanity, then it
was too little. He held his nose. He wanted no part of it. What a high-minded, fastidious little theorist he had been. Was youth an excuse? Unhappiness? He no longer thought so.

Part of the affront he had felt as Mr Frazer agonised over the greasy rag of a man, who had never perhaps been more than a plain imbecile, was that in all the time he had been here, he had never once shown any feeling for
him
.

But there had been something deeper, even then. It was the fear that Mr Frazer, for all his embarrassing effusions, might be right. That what they were dealing with, in Gemmy, might be closer to them, to
him
, than he knew. Mr Frazer had accepted that from the start – he paid that much tribute to the man. He, choked by the stench of the suggestion, by what he felt as its blackening touch upon him, had fought it, but come round at last. He felt humbled now; and most of all when Gemmy, recalling no doubt the persecutions he had used against him, shrank at his approach. He saw – it was still himself he was thinking of, it was the only way he could grasp what others felt – that there might be something after all in mere endurance. He would have liked to break through the silence that kept Gemmy apart from them, find what it was in him that had made that possible, discover what had been done to him, beyond what was visible in the marks he bore, the one eyebrow that gave him his quizzical, wren-like look, that had harmed him in one part and in another had not, so that he had at moments, and most of all when he appeared merely dumb and ox-like, a kind of grandeur that went painfully to the heart.

‘Grandeur’ was the word that came to him, and he did not reject it. It did not seem too large for what he saw at times in a man who had been kicked from one side of the world to the other, not even knowing perhaps what part of it he was in, except that he was there in his own skin. That, the skin, is what he had come down to from the realm of noble sentiments.

They were in a place, a continent, where it was mere naked endurance perhaps that best revealed the qualities of men. And that might be true of every place, when the fabric of
pageant and the illusion of noble sentiments had been ripped away. In any event, he cared enough for Gemmy now to lay his corrections aside and set off for Mrs Hutchence’s, to see the fellow had got safely home. If he hurried, he thought, he might catch him up on the road.

Leaving the schoolhouse, Gemmy paused a moment, the papers safely in his pocket, and as he looked about him, felt for the first time that he could go any way he pleased; he did not have to go back down the ribbon of road.

To the north, beyond the swamp and its band of ti-tree forest, the sky was a smoky glow, cloudless because what filled it was a single cloud, blooming with a light that might have been that of the fallen sun, its ashes shaken out now and even the deep core failing. The forests up there had all day been climbing into the sky and drifting down again to cover all this side of the range with ash; a breath out of the heart of the country. There was no finality in it. He knew that. One life was burned up, hollowed out with flame, to crack the seeds from which new life would come; that was the law. The seasons here were fire, ash, then the explosion out of blackened earth and charred, unkillable stumps, of springy shoots and loose-folded, sticky little leaves; the hard seed tormented with flame till it splits, springs open, then a hissing as the first raindrops plump and spatter, and the new forest, leaf by leaf in its old shape, ghostly at first in its feathery lightness, breathes out of charred sticks and smoulder in a season too long to be measured by days or moons or by one man’s life or many.

He walked swiftly now over the charred earth and was himself crumbling. If he did not find the word soon that would let him enter here, there would be nothing left of him but a ghost of heat, a whiff as he passed of fallen ash.

A drop of moisture sizzled on his tongue: the word – he had found it.
Water
. Slow dribbles of rain began to fall. He was entering rain country. Soon the sky let down tangled streamers, and he was walking now in a known landscape; all the names of things, as he met them, even in their ashen form,
shone on his breath, sprang up in their real lives about him, succulent green, soft paw and eyeball, muscle tense under fur.

He still carried in his pocket the sheets of paper on which they had written down his life. He took them out now. They were sodden. Rain had begun to wash the writing from them, the names, the events; their black magic now a watery sky-colour, the sooty grains sluicing away even as he watched; the paper turning pulpy, beginning to break up in his hands, dropping like soggy crumbs from his fingers into puddles where he left them, bits all disconnected …
and my friens Billy an … pretty little black patch over … thunder Then … of every colour of …