Bettany's Book (60 page)

‘But they do well, I know, for they hold the brush very exactly,’ Phoebe would tell me. ‘I mean, they know how to hold a brush, something a child needs to be taught.’

I had indeed once blundered upon a Ngarigo dance, or what they called
corroboree
, a dance by firelight, and the men had used the clays of Nugan Ganway – the plentiful brown, the rarer ochre, red and yellow, and the white from a particular white clay cliff cut by the stream of the Murrumbidgee some way west of Nugan Ganway, to enhance their bodies and faces quite graphically. But I hoped Phoebe did not look for too much improvement to derive from her intermittent outdoor classes. The last one who had put faith in the universal talents of the natives had been Mr Loosely.

Phoebe and Bernard had got to the stage of exchanging affectionate and sisterly embraces, and I was pleased that should Phoebe’s confinement come on early, she would have the solace of that company. The familiarity of tone between them showed a democratic impulse in Phoebe which must have come from her mother.

I noticed all this, but what I most noticed was Bernard. It was as if I were a theatre-struck youth who could not see enough of the features and movements of a given actress. I was not aware of affection – that belonged to Phoebe. But a new need to
see
seemed to have arisen in me – at least, so I explained it to myself. I dimly remember as a mere fragment of speech the words Bernard uttered. The content was not significant. The gentle nature of her Yorkshire accent was the essential issue.

I might even walk out of my way to encounter my servant. But why? Who could match what pretty Phoebe had done – finding me in the bush, abandoning her home, embracing joyously the barbarous Nugan Ganway life? The valiant way she had behaved, the scope of her love, compelled a lifelong love from me. The sad truth was that a mindless oaf who occupied my flesh and passed himself off as Jonathan Bettany wanted for himself that familiarity of tone, that careful affection, those embraces, which he saw passed by Bernard to Phoebe. He could not be otherwise persuaded by intermittent common sense, this buffoon. To him, Bernard was a marvel.

The young loom-breaker Presscart drove Phoebe and Bernard into Cooma a week before Phoebe’s predicted date – finer than I would have liked, but Phoebe was in this as in all things a girl of her own mind. I rode in three days later, and in the middle of a summer’s night Phoebe
went into labour. Alladair and the midwife were called, Bernard and Mrs Paltinglass were attendant, and at three in the morning our son was born. This emergency compelled my attention and respect – there were hours at a time during the delivery, with Phoebe robustly defying her own pain, when I thought the careless, covetous clown who had possessed me was gone. Phoebe’s bravery compelled me! The sight of my son, fresh from Phoebe, raising a small robust fist before being wrapped in a blanket by Bernard, was a scene in which – blessedly – the squalling boy, my son, was the chief element, and, after comforting and caressing Phoebe, who made light of her labour, I fell asleep towards dawn, convinced that the birth of a son had saved me from all that was asinine in myself.

I wanted to call our son George, in honour of Phoebe’s brother. When I had mentioned it earlier as a potential boy’s name, Phoebe had made a mouth but not dissented. I was delighted. These family pieties were important to me, whatever her father might think. I was gratified to make any gesture to bring Phoebe and her parents closer together.

Later in that day, while I sat on the Paltinglass’s verandah reading, in what I had assured myself was my old calm, the newly born
Cooma Courier
, a carriage driven by a male convict wearing a splendid blue jacket arrived at the gate of the vicarage. In a blue dress and large straw hat, Phoebe’s mother descended. She accorded exactly with my memory of her, the slightly bruised and beautiful cautiousness which seemed to be the mark of the woman was still in place.

Making noises of welcome, I rushed down to meet her. ‘You have a grandson,’ I said, ‘And his name will be George.’

I did not look to flatter the Finlays in any way, but my own filial instincts cried out for it.

She grasped my wrist. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was managed then.’ Despite a little discomfort at her frankness I looked at her to see if there was any form of accusation in this. But she said, ‘No, no.
I
know, Bettany, you are a good fellow.’

‘And you make me very happy by being here,’ I told her, very nearly believing in the happiness I felt at all aspects of the day. What I knew more profoundly was that events had caused me to mimic the joy I should have felt. How, after Phoebe’s suffering and the emergence of little George, could I say, even secretly to myself, that what I cherished and retrieved from that day was the sight of Sarah Bernard emerging from the Paltinglass kitchen with a cup of tea or a glass of tonic for my wife, leaving behind her the rude discourse of other kitchen servants. And my
perceiving that here was a goddess amongst swineherds. Even while my mother-in-law’s kindly hand was on my wrist, that is what I most knew and most celebrated.

But I said, ‘How is Mr Finlay?’

‘Mr Finlay will play the grandfather in his time, I hope. He takes great time to grow into the fullness of his position, which does not please me. But he will make a doting elder sooner or later. I tell you now, I am possessed by a fear that unless he and Phoebe desist from their stubbornness, our son will not come home soon, for who wants to travel all that distance to listen to orations and rants?’

In coming days on that same verandah from which I had rushed to welcome Mrs Finlay, I held my son, swaddled and moving his head with that infant quickness. I sniffed the Australian air like a man with all life’s questions settled and for minutes on end escaped the ridiculous groove in which my head ran. My continual fear was that someone would notice a hollowness in my fatherly exuberance. And I
was
exuberant, and already loved my son. Bernard was something, however, which I feared would be visible to my friends, and sat in me not so much like the definite paternal joy I felt in George, but like a wound, or the swellings of a fever.

Phoebe and Bernard had not long returned to Nugan Ganway with little George, its heir, when an unlikely traveller arrived at the homestead by way of our now distinct track to Cooma. Even from a distance, he looked ecclesiastical in an old-fashioned way, with his large black hat and his leg gaiters, of a kind many colonial clergy found inconvenient. Closer up, he had the same pale and clouded eyes as new-born mice, and his skin was so pale that the summer had not turned it brown but brought out sore-looking patches of pink. His dray was loaded with sacks of flour, tea and sugar, and with boxes which proved to contain a supply of tracts.

He stopped on the north side of the homestead, where I stood by the home yard to meet him. He dismounted, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Sir, you have not been forced to boil down!’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I have been lucky in that regard, Reverend Mr …’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I am the Reverend Inigo Howie, Protector of Aborigines for this region.’

So this was the man Treloar had raged against. I felt an unease myself.
Had I behaved well towards the Moth people? This man might not think so.

But his round, reddish-complexioned face seemed mild and even hapless. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I would regard it as the greatest charity if one of your men could turn my poor horse out, and yard it.’

I told him that was easily done, and called on Felix, who was at the time seated on the verandah with Bernard, reading. Phoebe and George, who had had a restive night, were both sleeping. I asked the man inside. I had some port and gave him a hefty glass. He had the appearance of a man who needed it.

Phoebe arose and hungrily questioned this inoffensive fellow. She told him of her efforts to teach the alphabet to native women. Though she had persuaded three of them to look into the house, they had not stayed more than a hour or so, polite and timorous at one moment, and the next loud and likely to pick up objects – tea cups, books, samplers – and walk off perhaps innocently, calling on their fellows on the verandah to admire what they clearly intended to take for their own use.

The Reverend Howie drifted away in the midst of Phoebe’s account of the natives, and even on the matter of his own family. Reverend Howie, Phoebe and I told each other with a glance, was perhaps fifty years, and too aged for the task he had been given.

‘When I saw this post advertised in the
Church Times
,’ he told us, ‘I imagined something utterly different, something like the missions to the Cherokee in the Americas. Maize gardens and a church built of rudimentary yet charming materials, having about it much of the natural aspect of the country, and a manse ditto. I did not, for example, realise how truly wandering a race the natives are. Therefore how wandering I must be. On arrival in Sydney, I was given a dray and told to come to this quarter of the country without my wife or my older daughter.’

During the evening, he frequently uttered sentences such as, ‘It is so hard to get a living in England, or even to get a curacy without influence.’ And so here was pallid, blinking Howie, newly appointed by the improving Governor Gipps, who wished to be ensured that all random slaughter of the sable brethren be proscribed and punished. Again, by the way his mind drifted and his hand trembled, he seemed to me an inappropriate person to be a missionary–policeman, a regulator of malice.

Yet, particularly after Phoebe had retired, he had a few wily questions.
He remarked, ‘I heard there had been a Ngarigo woman shot here some time ago.’ I coloured despite myself.

‘May I ask how you know?’

‘One of Treloar’s men told me.’

‘It was not possible to report it at the time, especially as it seemed in any case to be an accident. I chose to take the woman’s child and have him educated, and that process is still under way.’

‘With the Roman nuns in Goulburn,’ he murmured, with a somnolent vagueness which made me dream, despite his dusty black cloth, of hitting him.

‘You are splendidly informed, sir,’ I told him.

‘It is my only strength. Inquiry. I realise that you have no ill will towards the poor nomads. I heard you did your best to raise the half-caste child who unhitched my horse.’

‘Felix,’ I said. ‘I am very proud of Felix. He has the attainments of a good scholar and of a good stockman. I have mentioned to him the possibility, should my finances hold, of an English education.’

‘You would consider sending this child, not your own, to Oxford or Cambridge?’

‘He is a remarkable boy,’ I said. ‘I had intended, and still intend, to use him as a mediator with the natives. But we have not lately met any large numbers, nor have we had any quarrels with them. The worst was when they slaughtered some hundreds of stock. The pasture looked like a battlefield of fallen.’

‘So you notice that the people are fewer in number, Mr Bettany? And have you seen how poxed some of the women are?’

‘The women who present themselves to my wife don’t appear poxed.’

‘That is right, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Howie with a sigh. ‘The worst cases die on their pilgrimages from place to place, or are found on the edge of Goulburn, in a brawling, drunken camp-of-all-tribes. Would you object, Mr Bettany, if I had a conversation with your overseer?’

‘What could he tell you?’

‘Sometimes,’ said the Reverend Howie, ‘men talk to the overseers with a frankness they do not display towards masters, however friendly and humane.’

Having begun the evening thinking Howie a pitiable ninny, I now saw that he was, in whatever state of bewilderment, doggedly pursuing the clear light. I told him to ask Long anything he chose, and said I had noticed some absences among the Ngarigo in an indefinite way, and
despite my trouble in drawing pictographs and ordering a breastplate for him, I had not seen Durra for more than a year.

The Reverend Howie slept in the parlour by the fire and at breakfast made a fuss of young George. Then he and Long spent more than an hour in Long’s rough, orderly hut, drinking black tea. Next I loaned Reverend Howie a horse and we rode out to visit our hut at Ten Mile. The hut-keeper was in attendance, but above, on a slope, a Ngarigo woman loitered chewing some plug tobacco, and I wondered if she had visited my men for a purpose predictable enough.

We entered the hut, and Howie questioned the men about the behaviour of the Moth people. They answered in the clichés of their bush trade: ‘Them blacks don’t have regard for property of others.’ This, without any irony, from transported thieves. When we emerged from the squalid little hut, the woman was still there and Howie stood regarding her. I wished we had brought Felix with us. ‘Hello,’ called Howie in a jolly voice, waving, but of all men to retreat from, she retreated from him.

‘I noticed your man had a carbine in the corner,’ muttered Howie.

‘You will notice it is gathering dust.’

‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Howie. He murmured, his mind following one track, ‘You mentioned not having seen this king of theirs, Durra. I think the Ngarigo have been much misused. Has Felix said anything?’

‘He hasn’t said much at all. He has had many shocks in his life, and they have made him reticent.’

‘The boy may be in mourning, Mr Bettany. The boy may have heard what your overseer has heard.’

‘And what is that?’ I asked. The idea that Long knew more than I did about this country always frightened me.

‘That somewhere north-west of this spot, the Ngarigo have been much misused.’

‘Please, please, Mr Howie. Clear words!’

And Mr Howie told me in explicit words.

It would at other times have been a grand excursion – Long, O’Dallow, the strange clergyman and myself, riding north-west along the Murrumbidgee and breaking off into the mountains, into the indefinite country where we had stalked the sainted Catherine’s murderers. From here I would normally have enjoyed the sight of plains strewn with those natural dolmens and, from one jut of earth we paused on, of one of my
shepherds and his tranquil flock. Lambs may safely graze … But you could see in the clear air that the man was leaning casually on his firearm.