The Playmaker (40 page)

“I know my part,” said the girl.

“You were
celebrating
your part, perhaps? You were celebrating Silvia.”

“I am always caught out,” she said. “It seems to be a condition of my life that I cannot do anything secret without being found out.”

Ralph reached out and touched the line of her jaw. The sweat dampened his hand. “Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave,” he said.

As he raised her she was looking away, as if the night itself were not adequate cover for her. He kissed her through the medium of those tears. They had their source, he fancied, in the night she had ransacked the Kennedys' wardrobes, passing the clothes of better people down to Andrew Hilton in the street. One crime, one capture, one sailor, one child, one Silvia. There was in her eighteen-year-old face and gestures the certainty that her vanity in Silvia too would turn to tears. He felt desperate to correct this assumption of hers. He kissed her throat. He encountered beneath the calico suit of white clothes the remarkable firmness and design of a young woman's body. Climate was canceled. He tore at the fabric so painstakingly sewn together by Frances Hart. Vest sundered, coat dropped, breeches tore apart at the buttons. And Mary Brenham tore similarly at his vest and breeches, which though adequately tailored by Lambton Brothers of Plymouth fell apart with the same ease as the works of the lag costumier. All at once Clark and Brenham were joined, blue as ice beneath that moon merely rumoured to be the same as the one which gave its light to Britain. His blue hand found the holy delta as she cried, “Oh soft, soft!” So the wonderful hard and liquid entering of his Silvia/Brenham commenced. How she appreciated his shoulders, how she tore him to her! What exquisite gasps compounded of Farquhar and unhappy criminality, of what Ralph thought of as lost years and unchosen motherhood, went into her cry as he entered. When he turned her over it was because he wished to demonstrate to her, at the peak of his joy, that her tattooed arse meant nothing. Raging as he gave himself, he saw the calligraphy of her thirteen-year-old folly shining like some runic inscription.

“Silvia,” he screamed, delighted under that penal moon. “Oh, now.” He laughed, recovering his breath. “Oh, now can our friend Rose forget us.” He had used Dabby Bryant's play name, he would later suppose, since the mistaking of Mary Brenham for Considen, his pursuit of Brenham under the supposition that she was a young and dapper surgeon gone lunatic, and his astonished coupling with incarnate Silvia seemed to him as neat as anything Farquhar could devise, seemed to be a gift and a contrivance from poor Farquhar's comic genius.

What was most gracious about this gift was that Mary understood it too—the play and Ralph and Mary were of one mind.

“I altered my outside,” said Silvia/Brenham, quoting Farquhar with a directness and a humour Ralph had before merely
suspected
she possessed, “because I was the same within, and only laid by the woman to make sure of my man. That's my history!”

Then, with the tears of the chase and the shame still in her eyes, she began to laugh as—aware of the necessities of time—she began to button herself back into her white calico suit for a return to Dick Johnson's house.

“I will have you built a hut in my garden,” Ralph promised her. “You shall be by name my housekeeper and by night my beloved.”

She nodded. She knew that was the way love was managed on that particular penal moon.

CHAPTER 28

Lag Matrimony

Lag matrimony was accomplished thus: between the scenes in which John Arscott played scandalous Sergeant Kite, he was detailed to the work of building a small wattle and daub hut close to Ralph's. Curtis Brand, who had fewer lines to speak, cut the lathes and wattles for the wall panels and dug holes in which to sink the corner posts. Ralph had not denounced him to Harry Brewer for taking joy in Duckling, and in Curtis's code of action this entitled Ralph to a certain quantity of grateful labour.

The roof was of that shaggy bark which could be cut in whole pieces from certain species of trees and which had,
ab origine
, kept the rain off the heads of the Indians.

Ralph did not explain the purpose of the hut to either Arscott or Brand beyond saying that it was for a servant. During the reading of those scenes in which Arscott and Curtis did not appear, sounds of adze or axe or hammer could be heard from the direction of Ralph's place, and a knowing flicker would, however, enter Mary Brenham's eyes. She and Small Willy, she understood, would be domiciled more in Ralph's house than in that outbuilding the two handy players were erecting. The hut would have its uses as a storeroom, an alternative kitchen, and a concession to the fiction that Mary was a mere servant.

In his nuptial frame of mind, he looked kindly at Nancy Turner the Perjurer, who by now knew her lines intimately enough to let her true spirit and sharpness emerge as she strode, queenly and dismissive as Melinda. She had loved Private Dukes and spawned a false oath to save him—affronting solider deities for the sake of honeyed, treacherous Eros. In one sense, good for her!

Towards dusk Ralph went down over the stream to speak with Lieutenant Johnston, who possessed the power to direct convicts here and there, to this side of the stream and to that. George could well have been amused—he had been the first to declare a love for a she-lag. He had been mocked behind his back, though he was built so huskily and came of such obdurate Scottish farming lineage that very few made jokes to his face. He did not smile when Ralph told him that he required the convict Mary Brenham as his housekeeper, and Ralph was grateful. He at whom everyone had grinned had not descended to grinning now. In that there was something to admire.

George looked through his registers in the small office at the front of H.E.'s place. “This is Mary Brenham, who is presently with the Reverend Johnson?”

“That's the one,” said Ralph. He thought it would be to betray her if he said that because she had worked in Dick's house she was known to be trustworthy. George Johnston knew, as did Ralph, that that was a narrow recommendation.

“Can it be done?” Ralph pleaded.

“Yes, Ralph, it can be done,” said George. How sweet was the compassion of a fallible man like George. Their mutual weakness made them brothers.

“George, I am a bad cook, but if ever I should shoot anything worthwhile, then I hope you and your Esther will join me at my table.”

It was only now that George showed some marginal amusement. “Ralph,” he said, “I would be honoured.”

I have joined a club, Ralph concluded.

In those last days before the play and the accomplishment of the marriage, the carpenter Arscott seemed to be driven to a fury of energy by the force of the mutual expectations of Mary Brenham and Lieutenant Clark. He rushed from the quickly done hut in Ralph's garden to the wildly accented scenes in which he represented Sergeant Kite, and then on to the work party which under his direction was making a rude stage in the new barracks building on which the play would be enacted. Here the thief of powder and perfumes John Nicholls painted flats and a backcloth on which you saw great oaks and parklands and country houses sublimer than H.E.'s place, and prepared himself for confecting and decorating the faces of the players on the night of the performance. One of the convict women made artificial flowers of coloured canvas to deck the stage, and both she and the powder thief too seemed to work with what Ralph thought of as a celebratory enthusiasm.

On the edge of the brick kilns, a similar hut to the one Arscott was building as matrimonial cover for Ralph was being constructed so that a small but tempting quantity of stores could be stacked there. On Ralph's one visit, he saw Harry Brewer limping about with crooked vigour. The calmer Ralph at the core understood that this access of vehemence and punch he saw in the world may have been an illusion. Harry, indeed, on a closer look, seemed not to be consumed by the sort of congratulatory sweetness Ralph was seeing in most people now, in his lag players, in George Johnston, in Nicholls and Arscott. Harry was plagued—as always—by questions to do with Duckling.

“My toxin is gone,” Harry confided to Ralph. “The Prussian Blue I used to toy with. Duckling didn't give it to you or the Reverend Dick?”

On the morning of Harry's fit and collapse, Ralph and Dick had forgotten the little phial. They should have taken it and emptied it, but it seemed a small matter beside Baker's ravening ghost and Harry's stroke. Now Ralph suggested that Duckling, in her concern for him, might have poured the stuff in the roots of a tree.

“She denies it,” murmured Harry. “If she returns it to Goose, that Pope of the Whores will know I failed to honour my contract with her!”

Ralph assured him Duckling would not do that. She was negligent perhaps but not treacherous. In his roseate state, he believed in the comfort he was offering Harry. Lucy/Duckling in the play could deceive Brazen by taking on the identity of her mistress, Melinda. But Duckling/Lucy of the penal city would not so abruptly betray Harry Brewer.

“You see,” said Harry, “she may have thought—after I suffered that apoplexy—that I was good as dead, and so returned it to Goose. You can't tell with those people! You can't tell!”

The term those people, especially as it came from Harry, shocked Ralph for a moment. He had grown accustomed in the last days to seeing this earth and this population as one thing.

“I am not built any more,” said Harry, “for a battle with Mother Goose. That big slattern is a galleon of Dimber Dambers, and I don't have the weight for it any more.”

Returning to the clearing, the marquee, the new housekeeping residence, and, a little beyond it, the new barracks where the play would be performed, Ralph saw—waiting by the door of his own hut—the Reverend Dick Johnson and his wife, Mary. He considered hiding in a clump of cabbage-tree palms—indeed he took temporary refuge there and observed the Johnsons taking sightings up and down the length of the cove, on the lookout for him.

They must be faced, Ralph knew, and it might as well be sooner than otherwise. So he emerged from the cabbage trees and walked with what he thought of as an absorbed nonchalance towards his home, his canvas marquee, and his legal fiction of a housekeeper's hut. He was—he realised—more afraid of Mary than of Dick. The tightly built, bustling little olive-skinned woman believed in the Johnson dogma, which was that everyone misused her husband. She was prepared to say so militantly, without any of the pallid wistfulness which characterised Dick himself. She did not bruise as easily as Dick. Ralph decided to act at least as angry as she would, knowing that if he showed any penitence or doubt Mrs. Mary Johnson would flay him with it.

He was not prepared for the Johnsons' sage regret.

“Oh, Ralph,” said Dick, staring at him with wounded eyes. “How you took advantage of me!”

“It seems to us,” said Mary Johnson, “that you used our household to provide a refuge for your concubine until you had prepared your own household for her. We had a right to expect something less arch, Lieutenant Clark!”

“We spoke to the adjutant to dissuade him from assigning Mary Brenham to you,” Dick told Ralph. “But we all know where he stands. He is delighted to compound his own guilt.”

“So we intend to appeal to His Excellency,” said Mary Johnson.

Ralph flushed despite himself at the idea of H.E., whom he thought of as a grey and preternatural presence, receiving frontally from Mary Johnson the news that Lieutenant Clark intended to cohabit with Brenham.

“That won't do any good either, my dear,” said Dick Johnson, almost tranquil in his despair. “He is a viceroy who would rather build a theatre than a church.” He turned his eyes to Ralph. “We are absolutely alone now,” he remarked almost amiably. “Mary and I alone are united in something like righteousness and in regard for Christian doctrine. We cannot point to you any further as a paragon.”

“I was always only a poor paragon, Dick,” said Ralph.

“When the play takes place,” said Dick in that same strange companionable tone, “Mary and I will be the only ones at home, a loaded pistol on the table between us in the event Black Caesar raids us.” He put his hand across his eyes.

“Come, Dick,” said Mary. “Fortitude, my love!”

Ralph had been prepared not to yield to clerical fury and denunciation. But Dick's wistfulness routed him. He found himself putting up a moral defence.

“It is better that she live with me than with a convict. Even the married convicts prostitute their wives.”

He had no evidence that Henry Kable, who played Plume, prostituted his—Henry was a jealous spouse. Yet he argued on, hoping the example of Kable would not come to Dick's mind. “On the first Sunday after the women were landed,” he said, “you married many lags of whom it could not be said with any certainty whether they had previously been single or married to persons left behind in that other country, the one they will never see again. You did so on the instructions of H.E., who believed that it was better for them to marry here for the sake of this society than to maintain the mere letter of ruined marriages in another place—marriages which could never be resumed. The Dutch geographers, Dick, used to say that there
had
to be a great southern continent to act as a balance to the land masses of Europe and Asia. Likewise it has always been H. E.'s suspicion—and I must say it is my suspicion as well now—that people here have needed southern marriages, new world associations, to balance the marriages and associations they might have had in the old. We have travelled too far in space—perhaps we have come further than human creatures should—and the influence and the glow of English marriages and loyalties cannot reach us here. I wish it were not so, but too much space lies between. I shall honour my English marriage, Dick, and I shall not call upon you to sanctify this loosely termed marriage I undertake here. Yet it is a marriage, and it will have honour, even if you denounce it. My punishment will come when I must leave Mary Brenham.