A River Town (23 page)

“The fault is mine,” he said. “Miss Burke was not aware that there was any lack of amity between you and me.”

“Yes, but you knew it bloody well, and should have told her.”

“Miss Burke is faultless, and should be treated in those terms.”

He turned and stared at Ellen Burke, whose back was to him. She stood on the shady, eastern side of the cookhouse.

“We don’t punish women,” said Tim, proud of his manners, shipped from Europe and to the bush.

When Ellen would not return Bandy’s gaze, he walked defeated off down the lane beside the residence towards his wagon, which
Tim could remotely see parked near Central wharf. A perverse image of their joint endeavours with poor Albert Rochester arose, and Tim felt regretful.

Ellen Burke stood between himself and the house and now turned, her cheeks plumped out with rage.

Trying to be conciliatory, Tim said, “Very well, you were not to know. But would your father and stepmother want the familiarity of a shared log? That’s all I’m saying.”

She went on regarding him from beneath the dark eyebrows her dead mother had given her.

“Naturally, it won’t go further,” he promised.

“But,” she said, not pointedly, not testy in a girlish way. Like a woman ten years older perhaps. “You’ll hold this over me.”

“It’s not my mode of doing business,” he murmured. She looked away but seemed to believe him. “Except, if you go back to Mrs. Manion’s, your father would know there had been an argument, and ask me about the cause.”

“So you
will
hold it over me.”

“No, but stay till Friday. If you like, stay till next week and meet Kitty’s other sister.”

She said, “You can’t turn it into a tea party as easily as that.”

“All right, don’t damn well stay.”

“You swear too much!”

“It’s an Irish failing.”

“Not only swearing, if you ask me!”

“You shouldn’t bloody sneer, miss. Your father came here without anything but a pair of hands.”

She said, “I have to see to the children.” And to show she was still arguing like an equal, “And you still have half an hour before closing.”

Though he intended to walk with her towards the residence, she made an officious and aggrieved detour towards the cookhouse. Feeling hollow now after his flaring display of anger, Tim turned through the residence and into the store where Johnny was, of course, chalking a wildly rendered tree on the floorboards, and Annie had climbed on the stool to extract cans of peaches from the shelf and fixedly build a pyramid with them on the counter. Tim didn’t have the steam left for an argument with blithe
Johnny. He pushed the boy’s shoulder. “That again. You are a colonial ruffian who can’t be reformed!”

Annie stared at him, seeking with raised chin his permission to continue with her peach-tin construction. He smiled.

Kitty was on the sea off the Hunter River, and Sydney still a huge way south on a coastline of submerged ledges. She watched the sunset with Mrs. Arnold and perhaps drank for health and fortitude some stout brought to her by the Pommy steward on a tin tray.

The children stayed in the store, and he let them pursue their works. When the Central post office clock rang six, he closed the door, as the distant Parliament in Macquarie Street decreed. A curious thing—the power of such far-off authority. He was further from the New South Wales Parliament than the outmost Atlantic isle was from Dublin. How strange the consent of the citizen to government notices posted in the
Argus
. Rebellion was in his opinion not the mystery. Civic agreement was the mystery. Uncle Johnny and the other transported Fenians had misunderstood such things.

The door closed. He faced the house, the evening. Ellen Burke’s stew, whose smell warmly penetrated from the cookhouse, came like a pledge as far as the store, and would aid him. Stews made a man sleepy and served as a signal of the close of things. Ambition and industry unclenched themselves, were etherised by stew-aroma.

“How do you think that smells, eh?” he asked the children, who looked up at him in some wonder, some puzzlement, as if he were speaking to them in French. They took their stew when it came. Why mention it, though, while there were still peach pyramids to be built, boards to be profaned with chalk?

Tonight he was tempted to suggest to Ellen Burke that they ought all to talk at table as if it was Christmas. But perhaps that would increase Johnny’s giddiness, license his desire to be an entertainer. Tim could envisage how he might walk down the table on his hands, avoiding the vinegar cruets and the salt and pepper cellars by great concentration on the task.

Afterwards, settling with a somewhat water-stained volume of the
London Illustrated News 1891
bought at the auction in Chance’s auctioneering offices from old Miller’s deceased estate. He liked these books, since they had the marks of the great flood upon them. The flood waters had read these pages too. The great brown, snaky Australian flood waters invading the genteel magazine. The news utterly out of date, of course, even by the standards of the Macleay. South Africa nine years back a minor cloud on the Empire’s remote horizon.

In fact in this volume, views of Uganda, newly ceded by Germany to Great Britain in return for Heligoland. Looked a bit like views of western New South Wales—wheat and sheep country.

Ellen Burke was settling the children in their bedroom. Later she would sleep in the screened-off bed on the back verandah. At the moment she did not seem to be punishing his son and daughter at all for the quarrel he’d had with her and bloody Bandy.

Someone was rattling and banging on the door of the store. He unlatched the storm lantern from its hook on the wall and walked out of the sitting-room to see to it.

At the door a man of ordinary height in an aged but well-tended suit waited. The cluster of rare acetylene street lamps at the junction of Smith and Belgrave Streets threw bright light on his right shoulder, but his square, hatted head was obscured.

“Yes?” Tim called through the glass.

“I wonder could you help me, old fellow,” the man said loudly, but then he lowered his voice so that it could not really get through the door glass. Tim therefore opened the door.

“Do I know you?” asked Tim.

“Perhaps. I just moved here with the bank. My wife’s having an important tea and—if the truth were told—gin party. To meet the locals. She’s out of biscuits and petit-fours and low on sugar. Does everyone on the Macleay eat like a bloody grasshopper?”

“It’s almost seven. Strange enough time to be having a tea party.”

“Know how it is. We’re a bit of a novelty and the guests won’t go home, and being newcomers who are we to tell them to?”

“You’re aware there’s a new law?”

“It’s a pretty poor state of human freedom when a man can’t
get some shortbread and sugar for his wife’s party. Can a fellow come in?”

Tim opened the door just enough to admit the man. The man entered, pleasant-faced, smiling. Could of course be a first-class customer to have. Would no doubt want extended credit.

Tim asked him how much sugar and how many pounds of biscuits? Then stealthily weighed out the sugar from a bag beneath the counter into the scales. He went into the back storeroom where the biscuits were kept in their rectangular, insect- and water-proof tin cases. He weighed out the amount on the scales in there, put them in a paper bag, and then came out to the smiling man and weighed them on the counter scales as well. A conscientious storekeeper. Then he did a sum in his head and announced the amount the man owed him.

Without changing demeanour, the man produced an ornamental badge from the fob of his vest. He said, “I am an officer from the Department of Colonial Secretary. Our instructions have been to warn storekeepers of the new regulations via notice in local papers and then to enact punitive fines for violations. The fine as advertised is fifteen pounds.”

Tim leaned for a while against his counter. “Sweet Jesus!” he protested. “What a pernicious way of going about it! What was I to do?”

“You were to refuse to serve me. You may send the fine by telegraphic money transfer through any post office to the address on this form.”

The man handed him a penalty form already filled out. The name Timothy Shea was on it already, and the address.

“You had me as a bloody target!” Tim protested.

“Someone in the Commercial told me you were a pretty sentimental fellow, so I immediately put you down. It saves me time to fill out the summons first, and then
you
don’t have the aggravation of my presence in your store for longer than necessary. You can, of course, contest the summons in court, but it will be expensive, and I have the evidence.”

He lifted the sugar and biscuits and shook them by the necks of the bags which contained them.

“You could bloody pay me for them then.”

“No, these are forfeit. You should read the Act. Any sensible storekeeper would have it framed on the premises like butcher shops which have the Health Act on the wall. Then when plausible buggers like me come knocking, the storekeeper can point to the Act and say sorry.”

“I say bloody sorry all right,” said Tim fervently. He wished Kitty was here to give this fellow her style of treatment. Men were frightened of her contempt.

Bereft of her, Tim went to the door, opened it, and gestured the inspector out into the night. The man collected himself to leave.

“Do you ever ask yourself, if this is a fit way for a man to make a living?” asked Tim.

“You can put that question to a magistrate, old feller. And he’ll tell you that it’s quite fit. Show me a society that does not need regulation.” The man was actually smiling broadly. “Consider this as a living act of affection from the government of New South Wales. People hate it when they are made an example of. But there has to be examples, now wouldn’t you agree?” He saluted by touching the brim of his hat. “I don’t object at all if you relate your experiences to the other storekeepers in town.”

And he sauntered off to the Commercial, having brought down the hugest and most exemplary debt upon the household of Shea.

“I bet you consulted the Lodge at the Good Templars on who to hit!” Tim muttered for his own comfort before closing up.

The teeth marks of authority were on him. How they stung! He was reminded by a familiar spurt of panic of the manner in which Constable Hanney had also shown power’s teeth in Kelty’s pub. You were left by Hanney and the man from the Colonial Secretary’s, both of them clanging on about civilisation and authority, with a fearful awareness of the crust-thinness of the civilised world.

Fifteen pounds just about cleaned him out. Spiritually as well as otherwise. And now without a spouse to tether him to living flesh and the named world, he knew he faced more visitations.

From his bedroom he could hear Ellen Burke leaving the sleeping children, creeping out the back to the privy and then back to an aggrieved bed. As long as she wasn’t dreaming of that little hawker. The idea that she might be doing so rankled with him.

Turn on his side. Turn towards the south-east and its mountains, away from the tricky town, away from the deadly ocean eastwards downriver.

Yet that didn’t save him. His marriage bed sat in the bright sea, and he trembled to see Kitty and Mrs. Arnold walking the deck staring over the gunwales. There was terrible Missy. In the sea, afloat Ophelia-wise, a bridal veil drifting out widely around her head. She paddled like a calm character. Like a child of Albert Rochester’s playing tranquilly in the Macleay at joining her father in his deep purgatory in West Kempsey cemetery.

“Can’t you make things go faster?” he cried out to Kitty. Pleading with his callous wife. For he wanted to leave Ophelia and Missy behind. Kitty nudged Mrs. Arnold, one woman nudging another in sisterly wisdom. Men have no patience. Wanting everything at once. If they bore children, they’d want to give birth within two days and God how they’d whinge about the endless wait!

So Kitty excluded him in front of her cabin-mate, old Mrs. Arnold. So Kitty ignored his fear. Like a judgment, Missy rose up on a rope ladder. When her head struck the over-vivid sky, there would be lightning. He began to yell in protest, and anger and terror woke him.

Oh Jesus. He got up and walked around trembling for a while. Despite the fifteen pounds, the smiling inspector so proud of the impact of good order on the storekeepers in the Macleay, Tim knew he must now clearly authorise another five-bob Mass. For the unnamed intention.