The Playmaker (23 page)

That plump bitter-mouthed woman, then, who had on the day of Arabanoo's capture tried to prevent him from playing the word game and had hit Ralph's shoulders with her digging stick, that was the wife Arabanoo had raided away from the Camarai. It was understandable that in Arabanoo's geography, therefore, the Camarai headlands, layered in sandstone and covered with the coarse and distinctive foliage of the new earth, shone like remembered combats and desires, and he raised his arm, saluting them, uttering one long and languorous word in the native plainchant.

But then the
Supply
heeled over, as if renouncing those familiar cliffs. The sails were noisily reset above Arabanoo's head and the prow came around to aim itself fair between the harbour's two headlands, which were the pillars of his known world. Now Arabanoo began to struggle with himself. As with an epileptic, you had the impression of a man fighting with hands no one else sees. The effort nonetheless looked to Ralph as if it might split the cords in the native's throat. As H.E. moved towards him, Arabanoo ran to the sky-high weather gunnel and, bruising his leg savagely against it, pitched himself out into the air and thence into the sea. Ralph heard the blow as the deep water of the bay struck him. He swam clumsily, fighting the petty officer's uniform which deadened his strokes. Like a duck he thrust his head towards the profoundest bed of the bay, as if he meant willingly to sit on the bottom and drown. But the naval uniform buoyed him and only his head would go beneath the surface. As he continued to stroke and strain to dive, they swung out the boat to come after him. He wallowed away from Davy Collins's arm extended towards him, but an oar blade—by accident—clouted him behind the ear. Dazed, he was lifted by both armpits from the water and dumped into the belly of the cutter.

They brought him back to the stairs on the port side of the
Supply
and dragged him onto the deck, where H.E., Pirrip, was waiting for him. Ralph helped him sit against the pumpdales and caressed his shoulders. Lieutenant Ball's steward brought him more of “The King.” It was clear to Ralph—and surely to Pirrip—that the native now thought he had been absolutely magicked by them. He must, for his sanity's sake, somehow be shown that it was not so, that he was not held by sorcery.

Ralph was therefore surprised to see that although H.E. showed annoyance mildly, he nonetheless showed it. He ignored Arabanoo. When the
Supply
hove to so that H.E. and Davy and Ralph could board the cutter for the return to Sydney, H.E. walked the entire distance of the companionway before extending his hand towards where Arabanoo sat, slumped, a wooden rather than a melancholy expression on his face. Arabanoo became aware of H.E. calling to him. He jumped up, his eyes glittering, his lips parted. He joined his hands together in a sort of candid gratitude. If your soul is absolutely owned by somebody, it is best to be on side with him—that was what Arabanoo was frankly, and by gesture, saying. He rushed down from the helm to the companionway and in ten seconds was seated beside H.E. in the cutter. Davy Collins, climbing in behind him, clapped his shoulder and put a hand on his knee. “We're going home,” he told the
ab origine
Indian gently.

Back in Sydney, Arabanoo dined voraciously on two kangaroo rats, both as big as rabbits. He was, Davy Collins said, exquisitely pleased not to have been taken away to the sky. All at once he began to call H.E.
Be-anna
, Father, again. H.E. seemed flattered by the name, simply that. He thought Arabanoo was overwhelmed by honest affection, instead of seeing that the native spoke to him with all the loving, horrified, and ambiguous awe with which Moses spoke to Jehovah. He did not understand how profoundly the native was surrendering himself.

But Dabby Bryant, whose fishing shack was beyond Arabanoo's hut, and who had her ear for unhappy dreamers—she would have understood the native's bewilderment. In a way, she was a native herself, since the Cornish had a tribal disposition.

So it was the night of the day Arabanoo dived from the deck of the
Supply
that Mrs. Bryant had come across from the fishing camp to give the native back some management of his soul. And that, Ralph was sure, was what lay behind the grateful hilarity with which Arabanoo now watched Dabby Bryant play Rose on the afternoons H.E. brought him to rehearsals.

CHAPTER 16

The Play and Poetry

One of the scenes which most delighted Arabanoo was the one in Act Four, where Rose bullies her simpleton brother Bullock as Silvia enters dressed in a man's white suit. Mary Brenham had not been in the white suit yet—it was to be a calico thing which Frances Hart had not yet braided and sewn buttons on. But the clothes thief had managed to achieve a sort of white suit strut which—to Arabanoo as to Ralph—went in delicious counterpoint to Rose's country forthrightness.

Since Arabanoo and H.E. both found the sight of women bullying a man so funny, it was apparent to Ralph that throughout the universe one of the comic staples of all societies must be a weak man at the mercy of a sharp woman. Ralph remembered the blow he had taken from the Indian's plump wife on the day of Arabanoo's capture. There had been—according to Harry Brewer—a brisk woman in H.E.'s history too. For H.E. had married a young widow called Margaret when he was twenty-five, and she had left him before he was thirty.

Whenever Harry Brewer spoke to Ralph about the times he had been quartered with H.E., either aboard ship or down on Vernal's Farm in Hampshire, Ralph picked up a slight sulphur stench of eunuch shame—H.E.'s rather than Harry's. For the young widow had brought to the marriage two farms—Vernal's and Glasshayes—which the young H.E. had run competently. Twenty years after the marriage died and Margaret Phillip went off to London, H.E. was still bound to the conjugal farms, personally running them in peacetime, and during war, in the main cabins of the
Ariadne
and the
Europe
, mailing his directions for harvest and market back to the New Forest from Havana, Rio, Capetown, Goa.

It is one thing to manage a farm while you are a spouse, and another to be still bound to it by obligation after your company at table and bed has been rejected. Harry, loyally, never pointed up the difference in so many words. That H.E. liked farming somehow increased rather than diminished this faint redolence of shame. They were not
his
farms. They were the rump of his marriage. In every attention he gave them he declared himself for what he was—a man without his own fortune, the son of a foreign dancing instructor. A man who had to live, that is, off property that had come to him from his wife's first husband, whose only shame was the excusable one of having died.

The nature of the war with the Americans—both the Spaniards and the French having made an alliance with the rebels—had sent H.E. and Harry on an escort journey to India, from which they had returned to find the entire conflict settled by treaty. H.E. had taken his secretary, Mr. Midshipman Brewer, to dinner at Chuddock's. Afterwards they went walking in the polite streets off the Strand and so ran into Mrs. Phillip, with her sister and brother-in-law, about to enter a house in Henrietta Gardens. It seemed to Harry that the brother-in-law was not too pleased to encounter H.E. and tried to hustle the two women he was leading into the house where they were going to dine. The brother-in-law, said Harry, had made a fortune out of pepper, curry, and tea. As he half turned to H.E., the glittering authority of a colleague's splendid house behind him, two black footmen either side of the door, he showed in his face all too sharply his sense of the redundancy of the two men he was trying to avoid meeting.

And they were indeed redundant—the conflict with the Americans and the French had just been settled in Paris; the
Europe's
men had been paid off. This ship sat at Deptford empty of a crew. In these circumstances a forty-five-year-old captain is a model of superfluity. A forty-five-year-old midshipman is, however, the peak of it.

This meeting was the only time Harry ever had a chance to look at H.E.'s estranged spouse. Mrs. Phillip was slim and slope-shouldered with neat features. Her mouth was small and straight but had in it a large eagerness for experience. Her eyes were round—she was a little bird, said Harry. It seemed to him that there was still an edge of anger in her to do with whatever incident or lack of incident had driven her from the house—though you could just as easily describe it as wry forgiveness.

They discussed very little—the brother-in-law could not understand how the Navy had not been capable of bringing the Americans to heel. What had been lacking throughout, he said, had been a serious intention on the part of the British Government to do so. H.E. asked him with that bright-eyed politeness which would later so annoy Robbie Ross how importers such as he had suffered from the American intransigence. The merchant answered—as if explaining things to a child—that of course Newport News and Savannah and New York and Boston, where he had once sold his East Indian imports free of duty—wonderful markets on a prosperous seaboard—must be a vast loss. The Captain had to remember, continued the brother-in-law, that insurance rates had gone mad and had not come down following the peace treaty.

Taking up his stooped scholarly stance, H.E. had looked out from under his brow and taken on himself the heavy duty of explaining on behalf of the Navy the reasons for American success. Mr. Dennison, the brother-in-law, had to remember, he said, that the Americans had enjoyed the assistance of 2,000 privately armed colonial ships, and that these ships had carried nearly 20,000 guns among them and had been manned by 70,000 Americans—all this in addition to the official colonial Navy, the French, and the Spaniards. The 2,000 private ships were able to act as privateers, and every craft they captured drove up the price of maritime insurance.

Though the rise in the price of insurance had not seemed to Harry to take the gloss off the fabric of the brother-in-law's coat, Mr. Dennison and his wife still groaned reprovingly as H.E. made his explanations. And all through this, Mrs. Margaret Phillip had kept her eyes on Harry (Harry said) and smiled at him intimately, as if she thought Harry and she had a share in the Captain.

“You see how it was,” H.E. explained further to Mr. Dennison. “One in every twenty Americans at sea and behind his screw gun.”

Margaret Phillip had then teased him for liking the Americans, and H.E. said they came from the same tradition as we did. To which she said, with that angry lenience Harry had seen in her earlier, “And what tradition is that, Arthur? The German tradition?”

Then she had disappeared into the Nabob's house in Henrietta Gardens, a woman with further friendships to make. Watching her go, Harry was sure she had not heard the last from men burdened with desire.

H. E. Had a smile Ralph considered watery and remote, and he wore it now as he observed the racy exchanges between Rose and Bullock and Silvia. It raised in Ralph a surmise about what had made Mrs. Phillip angry or impelled enough to leave the farm. It was hard to imagine H.E. sniffing after some other country woman, or being discovered mounting one of the milking girls. H. E., even at twenty-seven, would not have made a credible farmyard satyr.

It was when he saw John Wisehammer waiting under a tree to make his entrance in Act Four, Scene Two, that H.E. again expressed his only dramatic concern. “You do not intend to make a joke of the Hebrew, Lieutenant Clark?” he asked, nodding to Wisehammer.

“That is not why he is present, Your Excellency.”

“They are an ancient race,” H.E. murmured, as he had when first ordering Ralph to make a play. “And their mysteries should be respected.”

H.E. had authorised a modest wine, flour, and fish issue so that the Jewish lags could celebrate their holy days. And it was considered a remarkable ceremony by those Gentile officers invited. Gentile convicts as a race had no knowledge of rite and would have been at a loss to conduct evensong. But the Soho Jewish lags had been exact in their knowledge of ceremonial. This was noted approvingly by Lieutenant George Johnston, who had attended as a guest, being very much the champion of Jews who were among the felons, not because of any Semitic blood on his own part but because of his Jewish paramour, Esther.

Coming to the clearing one afternoon Ralph found Mary Brenham's baby son playing at the flap of the marquee, and inside—at his own deal working desk—Mary Brenham and John Wisehammer in an ecstasy of cooperation, Mary writing quickly, Wisehammer striding around the tent, his hand thrust over to the back of his head where it clutched his black hair, and his feet coming down in emphasis as he tried this rhyme or that. “Applause,” Wisehammer was saying, “applause, laws, paws, gnaws, doors, Lieutenant Dawes? Should we mention the gentlemen by name?”

“We humbly beg your kind applause,” murmured Mary Brenham, with a creative frown that reminded Ralph of Betsey Alicia and made him sharply aware there was nothing that moved him like a cloud of intellection on a desired face. “And not excluding Lieutenant Dawes,” she added, “his telescope between his paws.”

Then she laughed, and Wisehammer did, but quickly cleared the joke away with a swipe of the hand and went on rhyming.

“Humbly to excite a smile,” said Wisehammer, stamping his foot down to the meter. Mary wrote that down and looked over her shoulder, idly, to the complacent child, over whom Ralph now stood. She put the pen down quickly, as if she had been caught in a crime instead of a poignantly innocent exchange of rhymes.

Ralph himself felt caught out. All he could think to say was, “The future citizens of this lagtown, Mary Brenham, will be peaceful indeed if they all resemble your son.”

“We have taken the liberty,” said John Wisehammer, in a sort of doing-business manner, “to prepare for your consideration, Mr. Clark, a prologue or an epilogue.”

Ralph felt hollow. He longed to be included in their poetasting game. He said he thought an epilogue was a wonderful notion—to show convicts they were capable of literary ideals. He sounded to himself shamefully preachy as he said it, and he felt his blood burning. “Please,” he said, “continue.” He stepped a little closer and became confidential. “Do not mention Major Ross in your verses. He can be troublesomely political.”