A River Town (7 page)

Tim talked the child into leaving Hector’s clothes for collection by Mrs. Sutter. The woman should come here for the task—that much was owed to Bert.

He was pleased the girl was finished and they got out again and left Bert’s herds to the neighbour. She didn’t ask for the poddycalf. She knew that attachment was at an end. Chuckles belonged to the bank too.

They followed the route back to town they had taken the day
before, past the accident scene again. It had been all cleared away, the horse taken, the wreckage removed, the blood sunk numbly into a wet earth. The next flood would find it there. Bert would rise with the water. “We saw a man out there walking on the flood. His face shining.” That sort of thing commonly reported both in North Cork and the Macleay …

At last around the corner into Belgrave Street, home of the living land of pubs and emporia, of Nance’s Chemist, of Philip Sheridan Solicitor, Joss Walker Tailor, Taylor’s Book Office, and Tibbett’s Ladies’ Wear. And modestly at the end, where Smith and Belgrave made a right-angle, in the blue and gold awning paint, his own store.

Crossing from the
Chronicle
office to the Commercial Hotel for purposes the whole town knew of was the Offhand, a little ferrety bloke with an ironic face and a frightful pallor. He wore a grey suit and a stained collar. A blueness marked his jowls. Editor-in-chief of the Macleay
Chronicle
. Employed by the owner Hinton to pursue definite editorial policies. They were free trade and the Federation of the Australian colonies. Offhand confessed to being a former parson of the Diocese of Southwark. He poked fun at those who were always writing from New South Wales to the Queen or the Archbishop of Canterbury, warning them that Papist symbols and rituals were creeping into the liturgy of the Church of England in New South Wales. He’d never married, at least not in New South Wales; though he had a friend. Poor fellow a dipsomaniac. A good, democratic Englishman though.

The democracy and irony endeared him to Tim, who reached now for the rim of his own hat to greet him.

“Whoa Tim!” cried the Offhand, and Tim reined Pee Dee in successfully in the middle of Belgrave Street. The Offhand caught up to him with a shuffling walk.

“Tim,” he said a second time.

He had traces of a jaunty kind of cockney accent.

“Just to say we are all in admiration of your bravery and compassion
in re
Rochester. One Mr. Bandy Habash has been in our office extolling your rescue, and your taking in one of the children. Is this young lady here one of Mr. Rochester’s?”

“This one is Lucy,” said Tim. He was not at ease. He’d felt
threatened by the Offhand’s exorbitant praise. “Habash did a first class job, too. He brought peace to the horse with the trace in its poor bloody entrails.”

“Tuppence,” murmured Lucy.

“What?”

“Tuppence,” said Lucy. “Our horse Tuppence.”

“Yes.”

“Is young Lucy going to live at the store?” asked Offhand.

“I’m going to see the nuns,” said Tim.

“Then you’re a fine fellow,” said the Offhand. “Those nuns are expensive.”

Tim didn’t want to be called that just then. Going to the nuns was callousness in his book, not fineness.

The Offhand said, “Young Habash even told me that you beat his thoroughbred there …”

What did Habash want? Enough reflected glory to get him in the bloody Turf Club?

“His thoroughbred was knackered. Too much buggerising around in Smith Street …”

“And you then carried the deceased on your own horse all the way to the Macleay District Hospital.”

“Ditto,” said Tim, almost to himself. “His horse was knackered, for dear God’s sake.”

The Offhand smiled and rubbed his jaw in a way which bespoke relentless thirst.

“Mr. Malcolm of the Royal Humane Society is sufficiently impressed,” he said. “Mr. Habash has been to see him too.”

“My God,” said Tim.

The Offhand reached out and patted Pee Dee’s haunches as if the conversation were now nearly at its end.

“If you want your valour or compassion cut back in any way, you’ve spoken to me too late, Tim. The tale as relayed by Habash and by Sister Raymond at the hospital is already set in print.”

“Then why in God’s name didn’t you consult me?”

The Offhand laughed. “The gallant Hibernian speaks. Dislike of public praise is the mark of true heroes, Tim.”

“Any news though of that girl?” asked Tim, since that was about
the only news that could matter. He had felt Missy pressing him, insisting through all his helpless dreams.

“A bad thing to have lying around,” agreed Offhand. He wasn’t anguished, of course. Why should he be? All the bereavements of the world washed up through the cable laid under seas and over mountains and ended up grounded in the
Chronicle
’s pages. “Meanwhile I’m off for my morning tea.”

The Offhand started on his way.
That
was the trouble with him: he was too quirky. People made more of his contrariness as a columnist than they did of his opinions.

On top of that he had a three weeks overdue account at T. Shea—General Store. So he was lucky he hadn’t met Kitty.

Dumpling Kitty in the store was seated in a chair behind the counter. Johnny was drawing with chalk on the blackbutt boards which made the floor.

“Holy Christ, woman. I’ve told you not to let the boy do his art in the middle of the store.”

Lucy Rochester looked at the boy, who raised his head and stared back blankly without malice and with keen interest. His son. He could turn out to be a great lop-eared Australian—few opinions, few ideas. If they weren’t careful with him.

“Mrs. Sutter wasn’t disposed towards the girl?” asked Kitty.

“She took the boy in.”

Tim was partly shamed to be talking like this in front of Lucy Rochester, who stood there with her leg injury still wrapped in the neutral mercy of white rag.

“Well, there’s no advantage to Mrs. Sutter any more,” asked Kitty fiercely, “is there?”

He hated her tightened mouth at such times, as right as she might be. He hated her to carry her face in those lines. When he had had their wedding picture taken by Josh Hendy and sent a copy each of two different poses to his parents, his father had written back to him. “To hand, the photos of your admirable wife and yourself, and all the arbiters of beauty and elegance here around proclaimed her to be as supreme in excellence as could scarcely be described …” The poor old fellow had never met her, of course. She’d come to Tim, in answer to his letter of
proposal, direct from Red Kenna’s hearth, and had never got round to visiting Newmarket during their courtship.

And on the right day, smiling at Josh Hendy’s dicky bird in the camera, she justified the judgment of those North Cork arbiters. But she could turn off at will the generous gleam behind her eyes.

“Johnny,” he told his son, “take Lucy out to the kitchen and show her where the lemonade is.” And to the girl, “You know how to slip the stopper off the lemonade do you, darling? Good.”

Johnny wilfully did not hear and went on with his chalkwork.

“Holy Christ, Johnny, will you do it!”

Kitty put another tuck in her mouth and he heard her murmur, “So, of course, it’s the boy who has to pay for the world’s grief.”

Johnny dropped his chalk and got up and flapped his arms like wings, a gesture Tim would remember at later dates.

“Come on, come on,” he told the girl.

“So how’s trade?” Tim asked when the children had gone.

“Old Crashaw’s left an order. And Mrs. Malcolm was in.” She put on a fake ceremonial voice to say that. “I think she was disappointed not to find you here, you know. You’re her golden boy.”

“What stupid talk!” he said.

“She tells me you’re a hero. I told her in return that you weren’t game enough to face up to the nuns.”

“Holy God! We would have had room for people like this girl at the pub, if you’d been prompter.”

The old grievance. Kitty’d been booked to come to Sydney aboard the
Persic
, and he’d told the New South Wales Licensing Board that she would be in the Macleay in time to help him take up the Jerseyville Hotel. Then her oldest sister decided to be married and so Kitty chose to stay on at home until that event, changing her steamer booking to the
Runic
a month later. You had to be a married man to be a pub licensee in New South Wales. The license went to the married Whelans by default. Just for a Kenna marriage feast.

“One day I’ll bloody kill you for saying that,” she told him. “I won’t take endless blame for the Jerseyville Hotel. What a bloody hole Jerseyville is anyhow. And what sort of publican would you have been? A mark for every sponger! I didn’t understand what I was doing when I changed the steamer. But I tell you it was a
mercy. Someone was watching over us. Because you can hardly manage the supply of food and kerosene let alone grog. And the silly desire to keep your hands clean of lucre. Well, look at this!”

She took from her pocket an account from a Sydney supply house, Staines and Gould. He could read their Gothic-printed name on the top.

“You give three months’ terms to people and the Sydney houses want to be paid in two. This is our disaster, Tim. Not that I went to a wedding. Nor have a sister coming here. The fact that you have some mad scruple about asking people to pay you for what you’ve already supplied.”

“Then I’ll ask people.”

“You’d better do it or we’ll end in some bloody hole by the roadside!”

“That only happens in Ireland,” he protested, and went through into the residence. In the dining room, the girl and Annie were drinking lemonade from large glasses. Lucy sat in a chair, and Annie had climbed up there and seated herself beside her, checking on her sideways, and then mimicking her posture exactly.

“We must go now, Lucy,” he said, and the severity of the sentence startled both girl children. Johnny should be here to say good-bye but was missing somewhere, a bloody ragamuffin. Up a tree, or under the back of the residence, terrifying the wobbegong spiders.

“You’ll see her again,” he said then to Annie, in a voice out of which he took all the sting which came from the direction of Staines and Gould, Mother Imelda, Kitty.

Little Kitty, five feet and no inches, followed him and Lucy out to Pee Dee and the wagon. Kitty had a wad of dockets in her hand. She gave them to him.

“Show that old nun these, all unpaid. She’s only a woman, you know, she’s got armpits like the rest.”

“Christ, you know I can’t push dockets at Imelda.”

She took them from his hand again and began to push them into the pockets of his vest.

On the way to the convent, no one rushed up to acclaim him,
and he felt all the better for that. He was able to feel, therefore, an ordinary citizen, which was half of his secretly desired condition. The other half of the desired condition was for people to say, “There goes Mr. Shea. Generous man.” Not for such definitions to appear in print, but for them to recur in the mouths of Macleay citizens. This was the vanity Kitty mistrusted in him.

Bryson of West had different ideas. He had a storekeeper’s meanness, and delighted in people saying, “Shrewd old bastard!” He had farmers put up land as guarantee against his supplying them credit on jam and flour. The way to wealth and property in the new land. Hard to imagine the mean and continuous effort of the brain needed for enterprises like that. To Tim it was like an effort of extreme mathematics. Why make it? So customary was all this in the bush, though, that farmers had come to Tim and offered to sign letters of agreement for credit. Pride wouldn’t let him enforce them.

As the big convent in Kemp Street loomed up, he said to the girl as another inducement, “I will come and take you on a visit to Crescent Head with Mrs. Shea and the children. Have to get up early in the morning to get to Crescent Head!”

The memory of Crescent Head’s ozone and surf hissed in the summer street. A favoured place.

But it was a silly gesture against the numb, grave fact. She was nobody’s child.

Tim knocked on the large, glass-panelled door at the front of the convent. Very strange, the smell of convents. Brass polish, bees’ wax, a lingering scent of extinguished candles.

The youngest nun answered the door. Only eighteen months off the boat. All that black serge these women wore. Welcome in frozen Ireland. How did it feel here? What did they sleep in, these poor women, in this heat? How did they make their peace with the thick night in New South Wales?

A pleasant-looking young woman, some farmer’s lost child from Offaly or Kerry. A native elegance in her despite the pigshit in her family farmyard. Her noble-faced mother—Tim could just imagine her—carrying her bitter secrets in her face, the secrets of her womb, the secrets of short funds and high rent. Dragged down by
the gravity of things. And the child thinks, I can get above this! The sacrifice of earthly love a small thing, since the rewards of earthly love were so quickly diminished and brought to bugger-all.

And here she was answering a door in the Macleay. In a place which had once been a rumour but was now too solid, and its sun so high.

She seemed happy though. At least she harboured that young intention to have the joy of the Lord shine forth from her face.

She said, “It’s Mr. Shea isn’t it?”

The consecrated woman showed them through into the front parlour. Here stood a big dresser and a bees-waxed table and upright chairs. On the wall the lean, amiable-looking Pope Leo XIII, and the visage of Bishop Eugene Skelton, Bishop of Lismore, New South Wales. On a pedestal in the corner a plaster Saint Vincent de Paul. On a pedestal by the window the Virgin Mary in blue and white crushed the serpent with her foot.

Tim and Lucy did not sit at the table. It had very much the air of being reserved for higher events. They sat instead on a settee of severe lines, covered with maroon cloth.

The young nun went to fetch her superior.

“These are just women, you know,” Tim told Lucy. “Women like Mrs. Sutter. Women like my wife. They dress in that way. Tradition. But they have instincts of care, like all other women.”