In the Wet (39 page)

She pressed his hand. “Dear Nigger. No, you can’t do anything, no more than I could help you when you stalled the Ceres. We’ve each got our job that we can do for her, and mine will be over before long. Nobody thinks the debate’ll run into a second day. It’s one thing or the other now.”

“He’ll never unseat the Government,” he said. “They’ve got a majority of over two hundred in the House of Commons.”

“I know,” she said. “But he’s gone over the head of the Government by broadcasting to his people. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but everybody thinks it’s going to happen quickly.”

He gave her dinner and took her to the car and saw her off for Tharwa. He gossiped with Frank Cox for a time, and together they explored the possibility of listening to Tom Forrest making his Speech in the House of Lords. But either no broadcast was taking place or the Australian stations were not relaying it, and presently David went to bed. He had a copy of the Reader’s Digest, and he read this for a time in bed, and presently he slept.

He got up at six o’clock. He had arranged with Rosemary that she would slip a note under his door when she went to bed if there was any important news, but there was no note there. If the House of Commons met at one o’clock in the morning by Australian time, they would have
been debating for five hours. He decided that they would probably go much longer than that, and went and had a shower, and shaved, and dressed.

While he was putting on his jacket a note was pushed under the door. He opened it, and there was Rosemary. “It’s over, Nigger,” she said. “The Government was defeated on an amendment to the Address in Reply.”

She was pale and tired, with dark rings under her eyes, but she was jubilant. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“Iorwerth Jones’ Government has resigned,” she said, “or it’s resigning now. It’s all over bar the shouting.”

He was amazed. “But how did that happen, with the majority they had?”

She laid her hand against the jamb of the door to steady herself in her fatigue. “Nearly half the Labour members voted for the Opposition amendment,” she said. “Two hundred and nine of them voted against their own party, and fifty-eight abstained. There was a majority of over two hundred and fifty for the amendment—that’s for electoral reform.”

“Why did they do that?” he asked

“It’s the Queen,” she said. “It’s been a terrible shock to the people, the Queen going and the Governor General being appointed. We’ve not heard the whole story yet, by any means. But the bulk of the Labour back benchers knew the feeling in their constituencies, and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt about it now. The country wants electoral reform.”

“What happens next?” he asked.

“There’ll be another Labour Government,” she said. “It’s only on this one issue that the country differs from Iorwerth Jones. Tom Forrest’s going to send for Mr. Grayson and get him to form a Labour government pledged to introduce a multiple voting system.”

He made a gesture of distaste. “Another Labour government?”

She nodded. “It’s the only thing for England, Nigger. When things are really tough you’ve got to pull together, and share what you’ve got. It’s got to be another Labour government. But from now on, things will get better and better. England’s on the right road now, at last.”

He nodded. “Maybe.” And then he said, “You’ll have to get to bed and get some sleep.”

She nodded. “I’m going to pull down the blinds, and sleep all day.”

He took her to her room. “Have you had any breakfast?” he asked.

She said, “I had some snacks in the middle of the night.”

He paused at her door. “Can I get you something now—a tray?”

She smiled at him. “Dear Nigger. I could drink about a pint of milk and eat a few biscuits. I don’t want any more than that.”

He nodded. “You get to bed, and I’ll get it. How long will you be?”

“Five minutes,” she said. “I shan’t be longer than that.”

He went to the kitchen, and met the staff just coming on duty. He persuaded them to give him a jug of cold milk and a plate of biscuits, and carried them through the hotel back to her room. She was in bed and sitting up in a hot weather nightdress which rather disturbed him, but she was evidently very tired and he repressed the sally that came into his mind. “I got your breakfast,” he said. He put it down upon the bedside table.

She said, “Thank you so much. I’m going to sleep the clock round, I believe.” She took a sip of milk. “David, have they said anything to you about going anywhere?”

He nodded. We’re staying in readiness to go to Kenya to fetch Princess Anne here.”

“Oh—they’ve told you. She’s going to have a talk with Anne this morning. Charles is on his way here now, with Wing Commander Dewar.”

That was news to the pilot. “Is he?”

She nodded. “She spoke to him about an hour ago, just before I left. She’s getting them all together for a sort of family conference.”

“He’ll be here tomorrow, then. Coming by way of Christmas Island?”

“I don’t know—I suppose they would be, wouldn’t they?” She paused. “You may get your orders today, Nigger, and be off before I come to life again. If that’s so, I shan’t see you till Thursday, probably.”

“Wednesday,” he said. “It’s not more than a two day trip, provided that they’re ready to start when I arrive.”

She drank a little of the milk. “Sit down and talk to me for a minute, Nigger, till I go to sleep,” she said. He sat down on the bed, and took one of her hands, and so they sat in silence for a time.

“You’re very tired,” he said quietly. “Will you stay in bed tomorrow, too, if I’m away?”

She smiled. “It’s the reaction. But I’m nothing like so tired as she is, Nigger. I don’t believe that she’s slept properly for the last month.”

“I know,” he replied. “But two wrongs don’t make a right. If she’s as tired as that she’ll need a rest, and she won’t need you in the office.”

“She needs a rest all right,” the girl said. “But this is the climax of it, and from now onwards both the Queen and England will be in calm water.”

He stroked her hand, “Would you be able to leave, and marry me?”

She nodded. “I think so. I think when we’ve all recovered from this thing a bit I could have a talk with Macmahon, and then perhaps start training up the Menzies girl.”

“Will she be staying here some time?” he asked.

She nodded. “She won’t go back to England until England’s settled down, and probably not till they’ve had a general election under the new franchise. She’s got to go to Ceylon for a fortnight pretty soon, and I know she wants to go to Borneo. But this will be her home and her main base until the autumn, or your spring. It’s not a bad time for a change of staff, if there’s to be one.”

He smiled slowly. “I think that’s a good idea,” he said.

She smiled with him. “I think that, too.” She drank the last of the milk and put the glass down, and sat holding his hand. Presently her eyelids dropped, and she jerked herself awake.

He bent and kissed her. “Go to sleep now,” he said softly. “If I have to go to Kenya or across the world before you wake again, you know that I’ll be thinking of you all the way, and counting the hours till I can get back here again.”

She clung to him for a minute. “Dear Nigger. Don’t be away too long.”

He kissed her again, and put her down sleepily upon the pillow, and she turned on her side and sighed with the relief of relaxation from strain. He got up from her side and went to the window and pulled down the venetian blind to darken the room, adjusting it carefully to let the air blow through. In the half light he paused by the bed on his way to the door, but she was already breathing evenly and deeply, already practically asleep. He moved to the door and opened it gently, and went out, and closed it carefully and silently behind him.

He was tired with the strain himself, and now he knew for certain that a new flight was close at hand, when he would have to stay awake for many hours. He went back to his bedroom and pulled his own blind down, and lay down on the unmade bed again for an hour’s sleep before the ardours of the day.

He knew as he drifted into sleep that he was one with Rosemary. Together they would make one splendid person; apart both had been incomplete. He would wake presently and go away and leave her, and while he was away he would be thinking of her all the time, as she would be of him. He would go thousands of miles away from her in a few hours so that a quarter of the world would lie between them, but he would come back again and find that other half of his new self, and they would be complete.

He slept very deeply. In his sleep he seemed to be drifting further and further away from her, and growing weaker and weaker. The time of separation grew immensely; it was no longer two days as he had thought it would be, or three days at the most. She was receding from him in time as he slept; he struggled to wake, but he was now too weak. She would be there for him to find again, and love, but many years away. As he grew weaker she receded further; when first he slept he knew that she was only a few yards away, and if he needed her she would come. But now he needed her, needed her infinitely badly, and she could not come to him, and with the agony and disappointment he heard himself sobbing, and he felt the tears as they streamed down his face.

He needed Rosemary, and she could not come for thirty years or more. Only the animals had come, standing outside in the rain among the floods to watch him die. Only the animals and a dazed, delirious old Bush Brother who sat holding his hand while he sweated with malaria, touching
him with a hand that shook from time to time with fever chills.

He did not need the parson or the animals; he needed only Rosemary, and she was now too far away in time for her to be able to help him. There was a steady drumming sound, incessant, like a low kettledrum, drumming him out of life. He knew that he was finished and that Rosemary was very far away; he would find her again some day, but she could not come to help him now. His lips moved once again, and muttered, “Rosemary.”

“She’ll come,” I said wearily. It seemed I had been saying that all night.

Sister Finlay moved beside me, and she took his hand from mine, and held the pulse while she looked at her wrist watch in the grey light of the dawn. I sat there in the chair beside the bed trying to focus my eyes upon the scene, utterly exhausted.

“He’s practically gone now,” she said softly.

She stood holding his wrist, motionless. I got up stiffly and she made a movement to assist me, but I put her aside, and she turned back to Stevie. I stood there in the doorway looking out into the clearing, and it was still raining. The wild dogs and the wild pigs, and the cattle, and the wallabies stood in a circle round the house in the grey, rainy dawn, their heads all turned to us in adoration, watching the majesty of his passing.

S
ERGEANT DONOVAN arrived about midday, with Hugh McIntyre, the manager of Dorset Downs, and one of his black stockmen. They came in a boat from the station homestead, a flat bottomed skiff that they had poled through the channels and the floods. Donovan had left Landsborough at dawn on horseback and had tried to ride to us, but the horse would not cross the deeper channels, probably because of the crocodiles, so he had gone round by the station track to Dorset Downs to get help, and the boat.

It was only a small boat, and it was leaking rather badly; moreover, the rain still poured down and added to the water in the bottom. Liang Shih flatly refused to leave his home, and I think perhaps this was a relief to Sergeant Donovan, because when the five of us got into the boat we only had three inches freeboard, so that we had to sit very still and bale a good deal with an old cigarette tin. Hugh McIntyre promised to send the black boy back next day with a few gallons of kerosene for Liang, and I believe he sent some flour and sugar too.

Before leaving, we buried Stevie on the far side of the clearing, where the animals had been. The Sergeant wanted to leave that till the next day because they were all rather foolishly concerned about my health. But I knew that once I got to Dorset Downs they would put me to bed, and nobody would read a burial service over the man. So I
insisted that we should bury him before we left, and in fact, it didn’t take very long because the grave began to fill with water when it was little more than two feet deep. We had to let it go at that and bury him so, and I repeated the essential parts of the service while the sister held me by the elbow and the men stood by bareheaded in the rain. We put a little cross of branches up to mark the spot and blazed a couple of the trees in case the cross got washed away, and then they made me get into the boat and we started back towards the homestead.

Last month, at the May races in Landsborough, the first race meeting of the year after the wet, I took up a collection for a headstone for the grave. I took it up each evening in the bars of the hotels at about seven o’clock, because men drinking in a bar are free with their money at that time of night and everyone remembered Stevie. I had to drink more beer than I enjoyed, but I went on till I had collected sixty pounds by the third night, because headstones are rather expensive in a place like Landsborough on account of the high cost of transport. I sent the order off to Cairns immediately, and I hope that it will be here in a month or two, and we can take it out to Dorset Downs and set it up.

I had this matter of a proper headstone very much in mind from the first, and even in the boat on the way back to Dorset Downs, feverish as I was, I was troubling myself about the inscription. The surname was Anderson, of course, but I had difficulty in sorting out in my confused mind whether it was Stephen or David, or Stephen David, or David Stephen. In the long journey down the channels and the floods I tried to ask Hugh McIntyre and Sergeant Donovan about this, but I was really rather ill by that time, I suppose, and I couldn’t make them understand what it was that I wanted to know. I think they thought that I was wandering, because they kept saying things like, “You’ll be
right,” and “Not so long, now,” and presently I gave up the attempt.