Remembering Babylon (12 page)

E
LLEN MCIVOR STIRRED
. From the other side of the wall had come one of those nightmare cries that were so much part of their nights up here that she did no more at first than pause in her half-sleep and listen for the disturbance it might make among her children. But on this occasion there was more. A series of bumps against the wall itself jerked her into full wakefulness. She put her hand out, touched her husband’s arm in the dark, and he started up, his hand on his shotgun. Rolling out of bed he went to one window, then quickly to the other, as she, her heart swinging wildly, put her foot to the ground. One of the children woke. It was Janet. ‘Shh,’ she said, rising quickly now.

The child sat up with her eyes wide in the darkness and looked to where her father crouched at the window, his face tense in the faint light from out there, the barrel of the shotgun softly aglow. ‘What is it?’ she breathed.

‘Shh,’ the voice came again.

Jock was puzzled. He saw a muffled group, but it was making away from the hut, not towards it, in an awkward, shuffling way that he could not understand; a huddle of four, maybe five figures.

He handed Ellen the shotgun and began to pull on his moleskins and boots while she, with the shotgun ready, took his place at the window. She could see nothing out there. The group was swallowed up now in the darkness further down the slope and she wondered what he had seen that disturbed him.

He took the gun, touched her hand lightly in the half-dark,
gave her a warning look to be quiet, and slipped the latch of the door.

‘What is it?’ Janet asked again.

‘Shh, ye’ll wake the ithers.’

Going to the door, she opened it a crack, letting a flood of moonlight in, and a medley of night sounds, but nothing more.

‘It’s naethin’,’ she said. ‘Gae back to sleep.’

She had opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and barefoot now, just as she was in her nightgown, she stepped out, dropping the latch behind her.

Careful not to wake Meg, who slept beside her, or Lachlan, who was already mumbling, Janet set her foot to the ground and crossed quickly to the door. Very carefully she raised the latch and, barefoot like her mother, ventured out into the strangeness of the yard.

It was transformed, made unfamiliar by moonlight and the tinking of night-creatures. Big clouds overhead seemed closer than any she had seen by day, and the ground, which her bare feet knew well enough in sunlight, felt odd, not quite safe. She was aware of every pebble in the unevenness of it.

Her mother was standing very still about halfway down the slope, her nightgown shifting a little and the dark of her body outlined within it. She was struck by the heaviness, the solidity it suggested, and a sudden affection for her mother, which she did not always feel and seldom expressed, came moistly into her throat so that she was tempted to call her. The material of her mother’s nightgown was all agitated moonlight, but the body inside it was dark, bulky, deeply rooted out there. Though exposed, it did not seem vulnerable. She had a flash of her own body, dark and thin inside her nightgown, but was exhilarated rather than afraid.

There was no sign of her father, or of whatever it was that had drawn him out, then her mother, then her.

She stood without breathing, or so it seemed, and the calm she felt, which was all suspense of ordinary, daytime feeling, had to do with the tense and brittle strangeness with which the world was touched, which might have more to do, she
thought, with some quality she had brought to it out of her sleep than with the play of clouds across moonlight.

I am the one who is seeing all this, she thought.

That, as much as anything, accounted for the nature of what she saw. And with it came another thought: Me, not Lachlan.

She was aware suddenly of being outside in the dark, while the other children slept on in the house.

Not for a moment in all this did she think of danger.

Her mother turned and started up the slope, then stopped a moment, looked back, then came on again; and when she saw her standing in the dark there, outside the door, did not chide her.

They stood side by side and watched her father and Gemmy come up the hill, Gemmy stumbling, her father with one arm round the man, supporting him. Her father raised his head and the look he gave them she would never forget.

He led Gemmy by them and to his sleeping place against the side of the house.

‘Janet come awa’ noo,’ her mother coaxed, touching her lightly, not perhaps for the first time, ‘come ben, come to yur bed.’

When Jock McIvor reached the bottom of the slope, it had been to see no more than the last shadowy retreat of whoever it was. They were gone across the creek. He could hear them crashing through the scrub on the other side. There was no point in following. He had Gemmy to deal with, who was drenched and quaking, and had to be half-carried up the slope.

What he had dreaded most when he had come rushing downhill was that he would have now to come face to face with them; they would stand in the open at last. They had saved themselves, and him too, by making off. Cowards, he thought bitterly. But wasn’t he one too in the relief he felt? He was shaking, but comforted Gemmy as well as he could and for the first time did not draw away when the man clutched and held on.

Looking up about halfway up the slope, he saw his wife.
He did not want to face her. She saw it and turned away, and went to where Janet was standing, barefooted at the door.

That was when the real fear, the real anger took him. That in the middle of the night his wife and daughter should be standing out under big clouds at the edge of the dark, hanging together and watching him drag a helpless creature, half out of his wits, back from a moment of senseless bullying, while the men who had done it – neighbours! – were creeping home to crawl in beside their own wives, safe in bed.

He went on past them and dragged Gemmy into the shelter of the lean-to. Laying aside his rifle, he crawled with him into that musty, dark-smelling place, and did a thing he could not for his life have done a week, perhaps even an hour ago: he sat huddled close to him in the dark, and when he shivered, drew him closer, pulled the old moth-eaten blanket round the two of them, and with the man against him, heard his juddering breath, and smelt it, while outside moonlight fell on the cleared space round the hut where his wife and children waited.

Janet lay awake in the dark and it was a long time before her father came in.

She heard him undress and climb into bed, and for a moment they whispered, but she could not make out what they said. In the morning, grim-faced and slow as he always was, her father had nothing to say and she knew that whatever it was that had happened, which she had seen and not seen, she must not ask about.

Once, during the day, her mother came very quietly and kissed her, as if in recognition of something between them that the others were to be kept from, even Lachlan; but she did not know what it was, and when she looked up expectantly, her mother did not enlighten her.

Perhaps the gesture had been meant as a consolation. But for what?

The place where her mother’s dry lips touched her brow glowed, and for a long time afterwards she was aware of it, as if, at that point, a kind of knowledge had been passed to her.

It was the moment she would think of later – more even
than the more ordinary and alarming one that came soon after – as the true moment of her growing up.

S
MALL FIG OR
plum with oval, dark-green leaves, the milky juice of its young shoots being efficacious in healing wounds. The scraped root-bark of another plant (the
Ourai
or
Grevia)
is used to make a poultice: large alternate, oval serrated leaf with a small brown berry, generally in pairs, on a small axiliary pendicale
.

Barkabah:
broad-leafed apple tree with pink and white flowers, the fruit full of seed and tasting a little like dried banana
.

Small, creeping leguminous plant that runs in and out of the grass
, Kardolo
in the native tongue, with a blue flower like that of cultivated tea: three narrow long sharp-pointed leaves upon a common stalk, with a root not unlike carrot
.

These entries in Mr Frazer’s field notebook give no indication of the conditions under which they were made. Their clear copperplate, the lines as straight and orderly as a row of cabbages in a Berkshire field, and the details of the drawings that accompany them, do not suggest that what is being recorded belongs still to the untamed wilderness or that the man who is at work on them – a large man in a collarless shirt, the wide-awake hat laid aside for the moment but leaving a red line across his brow under the sweaty scalp – has for the past hour been plunging uphill over rough ground and is now settled on a log in a tropical clearing to set down, in all the excitement of new discovery, what he has just been shown.

To achieve the meticulously detailed drawings and the almost pedantic notes, he has to keep hand and heart steady. It is as if, in disciplining himself to the demands of the work,
he has broken through to a cleared place in his own nature where these plants are already installed behind glass.

Gemmy, watching, is solemnly impressed. His tongue, following the movements of Mr Frazer’s hand, works at the corner of his lips as if it too had a part in the business. The drawings for him have a mystical significance. They are proof that Mr Frazer, this odd whitefeller, has grasped, beyond colour or weight or smell, the
spirit
of what he has been shown. Watching a plant emerge, the swelling bulb or fruit, the perfected leaf, Gemmy is entranced almost to breathlessness, his own spirit suspended as the real, edible object, in its ghostly form, breaks out of itself onto the whiteness of the page.

The accuracy and attention belong to Mr Frazer’s dogged side. Since the day he made his first pot-hook he has known that he is a plodder; that if he is to keep up with the tumbling complexity of things he must pay closer attention than others to every detail. But he adopts quite a different mode when, under the hiss of the evening lamp, he takes out his writing-up book and lets himself loose in the realm of speculation. The lines run crooked then and might come from a different hand, as thought leaps, darts away up sidetracks, doubles back, stops amazed at its own discoveries, dances, kicks its heels up, delightedly tumbles:

We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. I think of our early settlers, starving on these shores in the midst of plenty they did not recognise, in a blessed nature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there. Is it not strange, this history of ours, in which explorers, men on
the track of the unknown, fall dry-mouthed and exhausted in country where natives, moving just ahead of them, or behind, or a mile to one side, are living, as they have done for centuries, off the land? Is there not a kind of refractory pride in it, an insistence that if the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is? For there is a truth here and it is this: that no continent lies outside God’s bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener and everything he makes is a garden. This place too will one day, I believe, yield its fruits to us and to the great banquet at which we are guests, the common feast; as the Americas brought corn and tomatoes and sweet peppers, and rhubarb and the potato, that bitter root of the high Andes that women, over long years, by experiment and crossbreeding, have leached of its poison and made palatable, to be the food of millions. (There is a lily-root here that the women know how to boil and make edible.)

The children of this land were made for it, as it was for them, and is to them a rich habitation, teeming with milk and honey – even if much of its richness is still hidden; but then so was the milk and honey of the Promised Land, which was neither milk, in fact, nor honey, and the land itself to all appearance parched and without promise. We must humble ourselves and learn from them. The time will come when we too will be sustained not only by wheat and lamb and bottled cucumbers, but by what the land itself produces, tasting at last the earthy sweetness of it, allowing it to feed our flesh with its minerals and underground secrets so that what spreads in us is an intimate understanding of what it truly is, with all that is unknowable in it made familiar within
.

Pausing a moment, he draws back from where his hand, running on ahead, has taken him further than he meant.

He is aware of the lamp’s hissing; of his wife, her head, under its cloud of hair, bent over the music she is reading through; and beyond the sill, the night, stirred by the clapping of wings, the inaudible puff of seeds as they spread, the random but orderly couplings and killings of a nature different from the one he was used to at home, yet the same.

Since earliest childhood, botanising has been his one sure refuge. With the loneliness of an only child among nine brothers and sisters, he had discovered that the world of plants offered an order he would never find among men. Even the idea of
family
seemed most moving to him as it applied to specimens as wonderfully different to the eye as the apple and the rose.

He was a night wanderer. Slipping out in the dark he would track night-scented flowers in the summer woods, or, with breathing suspended and his whole body alert, observe from a hide, in the soft night air and a liquid light with its own colours, the life of creatures that were abroad, as he was, while the human world slept. That was the joy of the thing. While the eyes of others were closed, or open only on the fanciful world of dreams, to look in on a part of creation that is secret, but only because it lives in another time zone from that of men.

Night-creatures, night-flowering plants. They touched on what was hidden in his own nature; and it occurs to him, as he plunges through the undergrowth with Gemmy, or strides knee-deep up a slope, that in a way he is still at it. This, from the point of view of where he began, is the night side of the globe. He has found it at last, can explore it now in full sunlight. Is that why his discoveries here mean so much to him?

He turns back a moment to his notebook, and what he sees is no longer a wild place but orchards in which, arranging themselves in rows, wild plum and fig and apple have moved into the world of cultivation, and in the early morning light, workers with the sun on their backs hang from ladders and reach out to pluck them.

The theodolite
, he writes,
offers only one way of moving into the continent and apprehending the scope and contours of it. Did we not, long ago, did not our distant ancestors, bring in out of the great plains where they wandered, out of mere wilderness, the old coarse grasses that lapped the bellies of their horses, and, separating the grains and nursing them to plumpness, learning how to mill and grind and make daily bread, and how to tend the wild vine till its fruit yielded wine,
create settled places where men and women sit at tables among neighbours, in a daily sacrament which is the image of the Lord’s greater one? All this can be done again. This is what is intended by our coming here: to make this place too part of the world’s garden, but by changing ourselves rather than it and adding thus to the richness and variety of things. Our poor friend Gemmy is a forerunner. He is no longer a white man, or a European, whatever his birth, but a true child of the place as it will one day be, a crude one certainly, unaware of what he has achieved – and that too perhaps is part of His intention: that the exemplum should be of the simplest and most obvious sort, deeply moving to those who are willing to look, and to see, without prejudice, that in allowing himself to be at home here, he has crossed the boundaries of his given nature. Of course, such changes inspire in the timid a …

He breaks off, his hand pausing above the inkwell. He has come to a knotty place in his reflections, feeling a lapse of the high emotion that has carried him on.

One day, not long ago, returning from one of his afternoon excursions, he came upon Jim Sweetman with his granddaughter on his shoulders, a pudgy child of three, rather spoiled and with eyes so deep in her fat little cheeks that you caught only a glint of them as she jerked her legs and crowed. The old fellow was prancing about in circles, lifting his head and dancing left and right as the child directed.

Still in the excited state his excursions aroused in him, he hailed the man, and they stood a moment on the path while the child, sulking, jerked her legs, impatient to have her grandfather go back to being a pony. Jim Sweetman, patiently, set his hands over her knees, and still half-attending to the child’s call upon him, and a little put out himself, perhaps, at the interruption to their play, listened, accepted the hard little fruit he was offered, though not the suggestion that he should bite into it. So he himself did, and showed the man the seeds.

Jim Sweetman did not light up with the vision of orchards. He seemed embarrassed in fact, and at just that moment the little girl drove her heels into him.

‘Stop that now,’ he said, more sharply perhaps than he meant. ‘Grandpa’s talking.’

The child’s face collapsed. She took a breath, and Jim Sweetman, feeling the change of weight in her little body, lifted her down on to his arm.

Too late. She had begun to shriek, and very satisfied with the effect it produced, she continued, and would not be pacified. He had stood by, waiting for the child’s passion to exhaust itself. He had forgotten what fierce, self-willed little creatures children could be. It was so long since he had had any of his own.

The child shot a glance at him, shrieked again, and Jim Sweetman, stricken, while the child sobbed into his breast, shook his head at him as if
he
were responsible. If the man recalled anything of the occasion it would be the little girl’s grief. The hard little fruit he had been shown meant nothing to him.

Jim Sweetman, for all his lack of imagination, was the best of them. He knew better than to try the rest. Being caught, once or twice, coming in with Gemmy, he had seen the look in their eyes, and felt Gemmy, who missed very little in this way, fall away from his side – intending, no doubt, kind creature that he was, to protect him.

If he is to get any response to his schemes he must go higher; that’s what he has learned. Farmers grasp only what they already know. So, with no notion as yet who it is intended for, he has begun writing what he thinks of as a ‘report’.

He looks again to where his wife, just feet away, sits with a score in her lap, her head bowed over her music. She turns a page, her hand going to catch a wisp of hair that has come astray.

‘What is it?’ he asks, as if he heard a faint burst of what she is playing in her head. ‘Is it Field?’ But she does not look up. She has not heard him over the wave of notes.

He is in the habit of turning pages for her while she plays – or rather, he was; she has no instrument up here. It is the first time in all their moves that he has been unable to provide one for her. She does not complain; though music, he knows, is
her refuge from the frustration she sometimes feels. With
him
, with his passionate confusions. She saves herself by taking no part in his interests, perhaps out of a fear of finding them foolish, and he in turn keeps out of hers. He does not interfere in the letters she writes to their girls, and to the boy, Edward, except to add his greetings at the bottom of a page. And if he dips at times into the things she likes to read, articles on political economy and the like in the journals she receives, it is not because he hopes to share their arguments with her, but, in a tender way, to catch a glimpse of where she has been, and what it might be there that has excited her. He reads over such passages, and their underlinings, with a deep pleasure, though often enough they have no meaning to him. Only in music, when he turns the pages and sees precisely where her fingers have arrived at in the score, is he quite certain of her emotions and his own, and feels they are one.

They have been married for thirty-three years. She has followed him in his progress – or decline – halfway across the world, and further each year from her real life, which is, he knows, in their children. She is cleverer than he is but does not make him feel it. Cleverness, she knows, has nothing to do with what he is after; which is revelation. What will be revealed, he believes, is the unique gift that is in each man and woman, in each creature and plant too – what else has his study of nature shown him? – and must also be in him: a gift he alone can give to the world, and which without him it must lack.

She sits with the music spread in her lap. The piece has come to an end. Quickly, feeling his gaze, she looks up, makes a face, not at all the face of a woman in her sixties – a child, it might be, playfully poking a tongue at him – then places her hands on her hips, leans far back from the waist, and yawns.