A River Town (38 page)

Bandy burned with his story.

“Like you I am used to doorways, to waiting, to receiving the odour of the house and the currents a house contains. Often curious smells, Mr. Shea. Made up of God knows what. Bad secrets and failures here and there. But this door was so different, this house. A mighty breeze, Mr. Shea. Blasting away at me.”

“It’s a big, old, comfortless place,” explained Tim.

“No, no,” insisted Bandy, shaking off Tim’s blunt explanations. “More than that, old chap. As that wind washed over me, I knew at once that Jesus was more than prophet, was the living Son of God. It was so clear to me, Mr. Shea. Christ the Son of God. The man I was waiting to see might well be perhaps nothing more than a hawker like me. Except for this, this serious truth which had washed over my face and skin, bathed and baptised me. And I was ready and thirsty for it after the awful day we had suffered. Ready to be refreshed, Timothy, and made anew. I am not a
servant
of the valley. I am its citizen.”

“But you always have been.”

“Not quite,” said Bandy with a tired smile. “But now I felt that my blood was your blood, Mr. Shea, and that we were both brothers in redemption. I have become one with you, old chap. I am, to quote Father Bruggy, taking instruction in the faith.”

Bruggy. Consumptive Bruggy.

“What will your father say of this move?”

“It will be a sadness for my father. He will say this to me:
You would not do it if they threatened to shoot you. So why do you do it for the sake of a breeze?
”

“I think that’s a bloody good question, Bandy.”

“I pray with a fresh voice. A fresh voice which the Great Virgin has never heard before.”

The idea washed into Tim and gave him a sudden colour of hope. But it came to his tongue as irony and laughter. “At least they won’t be able to say you’re a Fenian, son. Fenians come a bit pinker than you.”

A sulphur-crested cockatoo, a big, robust bird, tore through the air at the corner of Tim’s sight. It arrested and shocked him with its brilliant white, its splendid yellow comb. It joined others of its species in a tall gum tree in the paddock across the road. A tree so adorned always looked as if its branches were hung with white and yellow silk.

There was something about this brightness this morning which caused Tim to sag and weep. Bandy was forced to hold him up.

“Tim, Tim,” said Bandy. “We must go to our daily work, though in grief and weariness.” He freed a hand and indicated the sky, the Angelus tower, the Celtic cross atop the church and the school. “We must be borne up and consoled by all this.”

Drinking tea at the dining room table, Mamie and Kitty looked wan.

“You went to Mass?” asked Mamie.

Considering her, he felt no enmity. No admiration either. Not for her vanity. But Lord, the hell had been shaken out of it!

“A lot of people were there,” said Tim. But he did not mention Bandy. With sleep and in time, Bandy might change his attitude.

“I must go,” said Mamie. “I must go too. I must go to the Rosary tonight.”

Become a nun while you’re at it and leave a space here for orphans.

“Will you excuse me,” he asked, forcing a little sociable smile. “I have a letter to write.”

Kitty looked so pale. “Don’t work too hard, Tim,” she sighed.

Johnny and Annie still slept. An hour to store-opening. He found the inkwell in the living room and the special paper and sat at the table with the formal lamp on it. Rarely lit, this one, painted glass. A shepherdess with a bodice. French. Visits by Old Burke might warrant lighting this special lamp.

He began to write a letter.

“To Whom It May Concern”

The
whom
, he knew very well, was Ernie. Ernie who had chosen to be aggrieved with him. Ernie who had wanted a ceremony and citizenry unspoiled by the Missy affair. But it was impossible that Ernie actually
knew
the girl. Unthinkable that the spouse of divine Winnie … Well not impossible, but unlikely. Missy simply a shire scandal so huge no one talked about it. They wished to cover it up with regiments, to diminish it to scale beside the proposed Central-to-East bridge.

When he re-read it the letter reeked to him of the willing, peasant cleverness which marred his family and made it so uneasy on earth. Yet he felt as well so guiltily consoled by finishing this testimony. Would Lucy forgive the small joy he felt in repairing this one wall? In re-making the little world out of a pond of ink when she had taken on the huge ocean?

He knew in his blood that she wasn’t coming back soon or late. She would lie punishingly far out beyond the surf. Not for days either. It would be decades he would need to wait and wait.

His affirmation and pledge sat now in an envelope in his breast pocket in readiness for an early call on Winnie and Ernie Malcolm.

To the dining room door beyond which Kitty and her sister sat, soberly drinking their tea and discussing in hushed voices. While staring at the door jamb, he stated his intentions. “I’ll be back in time for opening,” he said. He creaked out an oblique smile.

Kitty drew his gaze, and her frown and her clannishness now
seemed beautiful to him. Small, deliciously indented lips. A network of sisters too. For what he’d ranted about at night now had a new light on it.

“It’s just business,” he told her.

He put Pee Dee in his traces. Pee Dee recovered from his comic spasm.

“Off to Winnie’s,” he told the horse. “It’s for her intercession.” Hail, Holy Queen, sister of Alfred Lord T … Wife to Ernie, the Buddha of the Macleay. If Ernie not in then on to his office. Had Missy ever seen something of Ernie? If so, how, when, where?

No, Ernie was a citizen, not a lover. It was simply this: Ernie did not want promising Kempsey burdened with Missy’s name.

A few morning people in the streets of mauve dust. They did not seem to be electrified by the news from Crescent Head. Two saw-millers walked down Belgrave Street carrying tucker bags, their children with them, running and returning. He hauled at Pee Dee’s reins a bit, secretly examining the men as they passed, and saw at once—or so he thought—that they would respond wistfully to the Rochester orphan. The only rage at her death came from him. “Sad, sad,” they would say. “Poor little thing …” The little doll-like tragedy would sit in the corner of their rooms for a week or so. Small-boned. Meagre. Fading.

And Mrs. Sutter to be visited and Hector to be consoled this endless day!

He turned Pee Dee out of Elbow and into River Street. At Ernie’s place he was slow in tethering Pee Dee, at last putting his forehead against the horse’s neck.

“Well, your tucker depends on this, old feller.”

Pee Dee took no account of this peculiarly human frailty. His air was that of someone who had an inheritance in another place.

Tim chose the side path and went to the back of the house. There was no activity about the cookhouse, he noticed. No smoke from the chimney, no fragrance of breakfast-kindling wood. Were the Malcolms not up?

He knocked at the opened back door but Primrose did not come. Straining his head around the jamb, he saw the curtained place where Primrose slept. She was there. In the bed. Because her breathing could be heard.

“Oh, the big feller,” she sang. “With the money purse.”

Staring into the depths of the house, he was startled to see immobile Winnie regarding him narrowly from the door of the dining room.

“Oh,” he said. “Mrs. Malcolm.”

“Is it you again?” she asked, in a tone which implied she did not seem to be sure who it was. A sad deterioration. She too was falling down some slope. She wore an evening jacket and a long loose muslin dress. Long, long strands of hair had come unbraided. In the crook of her right arm, she carried her black cat.

“I wondered was Ernie in?”

“Ernie’s gone all night. A
contretemps
. His favourite servant, mind you, has a fever.”

She nodded towards the curtained space.

“I’ll go and see him at his office then.”

“No need. Come in, come in for God’s sake. Whatever you wanted. Drawing room. Drawing room.”

“I can’t stay long,” said Tim.

He followed her along the hallway into a vast drawing room. Three settees, lamps, a roll top desk, a bookcase. A distant table, with china stacked on it. A flash dinner set gleaming there.

“My husband brought home a gift,” said Winnie, “and as so often happens it triggered disputation. Perhaps if you see him when you go on to visit him, you could tell him I need him to come home again?”

A certain moisture appeared in her eyes and she flushed. The cat remained strangely quiet in the crook of her arm.

“Yes, I’ll do that for you,” said Tim. “Perhaps something you could do for me. People think I write these letters, that I’m political. I wondered could you speak to Ernie for me? I swear I wrote no letters.”

“And you will speak for me, Tim? Is that the bargain? Tennyson speaks for Daley? Daley speaks for Tennyson? ‘So I triumphed ere my passion, sweeping thro’ me, left me dry, Left me with a palseyed heart and left me with a jaundiced eye.’ That’s what Tennyson says.”

“It’s a nice set of china, as far as I can tell from this distance,” said Tim, abashed, and unable to quote a thing in this contest of
rhymes. “I’m sure Ernie will be home soon, but I’ll tell him if I’m lucky enough to see him.”

“Home they brought her warrior dead,” said Winnie on a streak of verse,

“It’ll be all right,” said Tim.

He wanted to be off. He wanted to find Ernie, who would probably be irritable after a night spent in the Commercial, or perhaps on the floor of his office. But he must be spoken to direct.

“I’ve taken a vow now, Tim,” said Winnie Malcolm. “No more verse. No more verse. This is Kempsey after all. And Ernie is Ernie. The china from David Jones is the limit of grand things.”

“Is that cat well?”

She closed her eyes and her mouth slackened.

“It seems sick.”

She laughed and squeezed her teary eyes up and seemed to squeeze the poor cat as well. Six months ago he’d thought her the most abstractly beautiful woman on earth.

“I’ll ask him not to ruin you, Tim. You ask him not to ruin me in return.”

“If you’ll ask him calmly, he must take notice of you.”

“A kind of notice,” she said, beginning to shudder. “A kind of notice. Do you know my cat’s name? Its name is Electra.”

It seemed an overly classical name for a Macleay mouser.

She shook her head. “Ernie calls it Kitty. So your fat little wife and your brats, Mr. Shea! You’re worried for them?”

“Extremely so, Mrs. Malcolm. I have given people good credit and am given little credit myself.”

“I must stand by you and thank you, Tim, for all the poetry. There is something you can do for me. Would you kindly post this letter? I am not well enough to go out and do it myself.”

She gave him a thick and odd-sized envelope. Something stiff had been wadded in it. He knew it was un-gallant to read the address, so maintaining custody of the eyes he put it into the side
pocket of his coat, his breast pocket being already occupied by his solemn declaration.

“Have no concern,” he said. “It’ll be attended to today.”

“The letter not to be mentioned to Ernie, though.”

Oh God, she was making a conspirator of him. And if Ernie discovered this … Well!

“All right,” he admitted. “Everything is in confidence between you and me. If I post this letter, I never posted it. All right? Is that our understanding?”

She moved the seemingly sick cat into the crook of her left elbow and hauled Tim to herself without warning, kissing him wetly and lushly on the lips. This was an experience nothing like what he had once envisaged and—with one side of his nature—expected.

Before he could disengage himself, he heard behind him someone enter and commence gasping. The sound of outrage? Bloody Ernie! he surmised.

But battling Mrs. Malcolm away, he saw it was Primrose emerged from the corridor. Looking at him from broiled eyes. “Oh the white feller,” she announced. “Fire on his bloody head!”

“Dear God, Winnie,” said Tim. “She is very sick.”

Primrose slid to the floor and lay on her side, wheezing. Something landed up from another realm.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh dear Jesus. This is not plague, is it?”

“Don’t be a ninny, Shea. It is purely influenza.”

“Does Ernie know?”

“She had nothing more than a cough at teatime yesterday.”

The
Argus
and the
Chronicle
were unanimous in the matter of sudden onset.

“I must fetch Dr. Erson.”

“Oh, you arrange my affairs? Yet want me to speak for you!”

“Let me find a rug for Primrose.”

“Yes. Make free of my house, Mr. Shea. Go on. Do whatever you like.”

Out through a wide door and across the lobby, he found a bedroom but kept custody of his eyes as if he were being observed by Ernie and would need to justify himself. If it were simple influenza, what a fool he would be! People could rave from a mixture
of influenza and laudanum. People could see fire about the heads of others.

When he came back with the rug from the base of the Malcolm bed, he was pleased to see Winnie Malcolm seated. She had lain the cat, purring and gagging by turns, on the ground.

“Look,” said Tim. “It is shedding.” There was a trail of black hairs where the thing writhed.

Winnie laughed awfully. She drew herself up in a theatrical posture. “Then you must do something, Shea! Men of action and decision. ‘Bury the Great Duke, With an Empire’s Lamentation!’ Holy God in Heaven, what a laughable crew!”