Remembering Babylon (13 page)

The other women in the settlement found the minister’s wife poky. It had got about that she was the cousin of an earl, maybe a duke, and they had hoped for glimpses in her of the romance of birth, even in the reduced form, up here, of a
silver milk jug or a set of crested spoons. They wanted a hint in their vicinity of pride, high custom, refinement. That the Frazers were poverty-stricken was no impediment. That was
his
fault.

But she fulfilled none of these easy expectations and might even have set out, in her brusque way, to thwart them. She was a small freckled person, though fine-boned, with a mass of hair that had once been red-gold and was now rusty and none too well controlled. She was dutiful enough in her enquiry about the health of children, but did not always remember their names. Once a month she received a parcel of books and other papers from one of her daughters, the elder one at Aldershot (the other lived at Poole and there was a son in Canada who taught school), which she herself went into Bowen to collect and would immediately, right there at the steamer-wharf, tear a corner from, like a child with a loaf of bread; she was so hungry for its contents.

They would have liked to send their girls to her to be improved with a little needlework of the fancier kind, but she had no skill with a needle, even, as you could see from Mr Frazer’s shirts, in the plainer way of buttons and hems. Many of them, poor as they were and with no claim to gentility, were better managers than she was and had a higher regard for what they thought of as the refinements. The one thing you could say of her was that she did not give herself airs. They would have complained if she had, but when she did not they felt cheated of the bit of colour she might have shown them, which would have been a greater comfort here than absent-minded kindness or charity.

‘I want to speak to you about something important,’ she says from the bed while her husband is still undressing. He looks surprised, then comes in his shirtsleeves to sit beside her. He loves these late moments of intimacy between them.

‘Charlie, something very serious has happened,’ she says, ‘you mustn’t be upset.’ She goes back a week to Gemmy’s visit from the blacks, then, too quickly for him to quite make the connection, to the attack at the McIvors’.

He feels the blood come to his cheek. It is only partly indignation and a kind of shame at so much baseness; there is
also the personal embarrassment of having it brought home to him, yet again, how out of touch he is. He has heard nothing of this; seen nothing either.

‘Who can have done such a thing?’

His wife does not reply. Today the men of the place, shamefaced perhaps, have kept out of sight. It is the women who have been busy.

‘I know you believe there is no harm in the man,’ she tells him, ‘and I’m sure you are right. There is none. But people are afraid. There is harm in that. It would be best – Millie Sweetman thinks so, and she is a very sensible woman – if he were put where they can do him no harm. Where he wasn’t quite so – visible. Of course, the best thing of all would be to send him away altogether – to Brisbane, if it could be arranged. But in the meantime – I’ve already spoken to her – Mrs Hutchence would take him in.’

So it was arranged. No one, not even his wife, has thought it worth consulting him.

‘Charlie,’ she says gently. She takes his hand. ‘It had to be done as quickly as possible. The McIvors can’t be left with him, they’ve already suffered, and there are children to consider. It’s true there’s no harm in him, but he
is
a danger just the same. Not through his own fault, poor fellow. It was best to let Millie Sweetman take over – people will accept that. And you know what Mrs Hutchence is,’ she adds lightly. ‘They won’t try their nonsense with her.’

But the heaviness on his heart will not shift. His one consolation is that he knows at last what he must do, and who his report is for.

W
HEN THEY WERE
working with the bees they worked in silence. That was how Janet thought of it, though in fact Mrs Hutchence kept up a continuous slow talk – it was the only time she did – which was not meant to tell you things – that was all by-the-way – or to do anything at all in fact but be a soothing noise in which the bees, Mrs Hutchence herself, and she as Mrs Hutchence’s helper, were gathered in a single breath into an activity that required this overriding soft babble to contain and settle them.

Mrs Hutchence would have been surprised if you had told her: ‘That was a funny story – the one about the Chinese pirate.’ She would have denied she had ever told it, and wonder, perhaps, how it had got across from
her
head, since the event or the memory of it might indeed have been hanging about there, into yours. When she was silent she often thought she had said something – it could cause difficulties that, Leona certainly thought so – but when she
had
said something she was, as often as not, unaware of it.

This business with the bees was like no other. Something in you slept while you were at it and you woke refreshed, which was just why Janet loved it and why the bees, now, were a necessity to her, as if without them she could never enter into her own thoughts. She felt too that Mrs Hutchence was her first and would always be her greatest friend.

The old woman had a strange effect on her. Under her influence the world slowed to a pace she could manage at last: by which she meant that she had time to
see
things, to let them enter her and reveal what they were. It was a beautiful
effect, this. Without it she did not know how she would ever have discovered certain things or believed they existed.

They had come to Mrs Hutchence through Gemmy, who had been called to make hives for her, and since he knew about these things, had once or twice gone into the bush and found swarms of the little stingless native bees she kept along with her imported ones.

The first time they went to visit her Janet had been carrying a present her mother had sent: a bowl of mutton jelly with a sealing of solid fat, and to keep the flies off, a crochet cover weighted with beads. With Meg trailing behind and the bowl held in both hands before her, she had walked slowly down the long road out of town, found the house, which they both marvelled at, mounted the stairs to the verandah, called into the still, dark interior, and when they got no reply, set off downhill towards the gully and its hives.

They saw Mrs Hutchence from far off, looking unfamiliar in a bonnet and veil, with her skirts hiked up and her big boots flopping. Billowy clouds of smoke issued from her sleeves so that she herself was shadowy, and the bees, where they passed through the slanty sun-shafts, were dazzling sparks.

Janet knew what she was doing, there was no mystery in it. But the scene, just the same, touched on something, just at the edge of thought, that she could not catch hold of. She would have liked to set the bowl down, relieve the ache in her arms, and concentrate on the spectacle and the slight disturbance it had set up in her, which was not at all unpleasant; but she could not risk it. Ants were already scurrying around her feet, engaged for the moment in hauling off dead bees, but alert already, the explorers among them, to what she carried. She had to use first one foot, then the other, to brush them off.

So she stood holding the bowl just yards from where Mrs Hutchence was working, with Meg, who was not sure about the bees, sheltering behind her; and in fact one or two of the most adventurous of them did come and settle on the crochet cover, and roll about there, and light at last on her hands. Mrs Hutchence, she thought, was singing; though it might
have been the bees, which were exploding in separate points of light, then rushing together in clumps. The smoke reached their nostrils. Meg sneezed.

‘Goodness,’ Mrs Hutchence exclaimed, ‘who are you, child?’ seeing only one of them. She came forward. Bees were tumbling in the folds of her sleeves and dotted all the front of her veil. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

‘I’m not,’ Janet said. Her stiffness had to do with the way her arms ached from holding the bowl.

‘An’t you now.’

Mrs Hutchence gave her a hard look.

‘Well you needn’t be, either. The smoke makes ’em sleepy, you know,’ and she sent a little puff towards them.

‘Dear me, there are two of you.’

They came often after that, and were introduced to the house and its treasures, but for Janet the real attraction was Mrs Hutchence and the hives, which looked so closed and quiet under the trees but were filled with such fierce activity – another life, quite independent of their human one, but organised, purposeful, and involving so many complex rituals. She loved the way, while you were dealing with them, you had to submit yourself to
their
side of things.

Meg, on the other hand, was attracted to Leona. Janet too enjoyed the company of the kitchen table, with its games and teases, but it was the hives that drew her more. If she could escape, she thought, just for a moment, out of her personal mind into their communally single one, she would know at last what it was like to be an angel.

This thought belonged, yet did not, to what she thought of as her ‘visions’ but was more reliable than those, more down to earth. They had a worked-up quality to them; she worked them up out of
herself
. This came from outside and had begun when she saw Mrs Hutchence at work for the first time.

She associated her feelings at that moment with the ache in her arms, and with the bowl and its two covers, the one of fat, the other of crochet weighted with beads, which had kept her earthbound if she had been inclined to float; but mostly
with the sound the bees made, the single vibrant word resounding in their furry heads, the way it gathered and magnified, so that she understood immediately not just
what
they were, in their individual bee bodies, but
why
they were; the flow of the honey and its making out of pollens gathered from all the surrounding country – the stringybark blossoms, the banksias, the eggs-and-bacon bushes they grazed on, the swamp-water they drank – to become the heavy scoop of gold in the bowl of a spoon, and the transparent thread from which, in its slow falling, it hung and did not fall.

She became Mrs Hutchence’s helper, with a sunbonnet and veil of her own, and soon was as expert, almost, as the older woman. But by then, the event had occurred that was to settle her in this business; and for life.

It was on a day not long after Gemmy had moved into the little room there, so she was no longer a beginner. They had finished their work with the bees. She had put off her bonnet and veil.

The day had been unusually oppressive, steamy, and for the last hour a dull sky had been glowering, bronze with a greenish edge to it, that bruised the sight. Suddenly there was the sound of a wind getting up in the grove, though she did not feel the touch of it, and before she could complete the breath she had taken, or expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud. She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.

Her own mind closed in her. She lost all sense of where her feet might be, or her dreamy wrists, or whether she was still standing, as she had been a moment before, in the shadowy grove, or had been lifted from the face of the earth.

The bees have their stomachs full, her mind told her, they will not sting. Stand still, stand still. It was her old mind that told her this.

She stood still as still and did not breathe. She surrendered herself.

You are our bride, her new and separate mind told her as it drummed and swayed above the earth. Ah, so that is it! They have smelled the sticky blood-flow. They think it is honey. It is.

Mrs Hutchence was only feet away. So was Gemmy. She could hear their voices calling to her through the din her body was making. But it made no difference, now, the distance, three feet or a thousand years, no difference at all; or whether she was a girl (a woman), or a tree. She stood sleeping. Upright. A bride. Then the bitterness of smoke came to her throat, and the cloud began to lift; and there, through the gaps in herself, was Mrs Hutchence with coils of smoke pouring out of her sleeves, and Gemmy, open-mouthed with a frame in his arms, and the bees, one by one, then in fistfulls, rolling off her, peeling away like a crust, till she stood in her own skin again, which was fresh where the air touched it, and only a few dozen foolish creatures were left that had got themselves caught and were butting with their furry heads and kicking, in a panic at being alone.

She felt Mrs Hutchence’s hands on her skin now, which was quite clear and unharmed but seemed new to her, and all through Mrs Hutchence’s fearful ministrations and Gemmy’s whimpering cries, she remained a little out of herself – half-sleeping, regretful, her two feet planted square on the earth.

Years later she would become expert beyond anything Mrs Hutchence might have dreamed of at the bee business. She would know all the breeds and crossbreeds, and create one or two new ones – actually bring them into being, whole swarms that the earth had never known till she called them. She would devote her life to these creatures, bringing to the daily practical study of their habits and all the facts and lore that is the long history of their interaction with men, a bodily excitement that went back to this moment, under the trees, when her mind had for a moment been their unbodied one and she had been drawn into the process and mystery of things.

For it was not the bees themselves that had claimed her; they had been only the little winged agents of it, the little furry-headed, armed angels that might, if she had panicked,
have stung her to death, martyred her on the spot, a solid, silly giant that had stumbled in among them.

All that was still to come. For the moment, still numbed by the shock of what had struck her, she moved to comfort Mrs Hutchence, who had sunk to the ground, and sat like a rock gone suddenly soft, and sobbed and took a good while to get her breath.

‘Don’t be upset Mrs Hutchence,’ she said, feeling the older by years, though her voice was unchanged. ‘The bees didn’t hurt me, I knew they wouldn’t. I remembered what you told me and it was true. They didn’t sting.’

She saw then, from the look on Mrs Hutchence’s face, that though her own faith had been absolute, Mrs Hutchence’s had not.

So it had been
that
that had saved her, the power of her own belief, which could change mere circumstance and make miracles.

She went, half-dreaming, and looked at the hive, all sealed now, a squared-off cloud, still drumming, that had once been clamped to her skin, a living darkness, so that the only light came from inside her, from the open space she had become inside the skin they made of living particles, little flames.

She had remained cool inside, and when the flames drew off what was restored to her had a new shape, was simpler; she had emerged with a new body, which the world – and this was the point – had dealt with to its limit and let go, and which, from now on, however things might appear, it could not destroy.

She was rather surprised really that she did not
appear
changed to Mrs Hutchence, since the body she was now standing in, as her mind saw it, was not at all the old one.

She looked past Mrs Hutchence to where she had stood just a moment back, and what she saw was not herself, not a gawky child in pigtails and a faded frock, but a charred stump, all crusted black and bubbling; and she saw it – this, when she met his astonished look, was what convinced her – through Gemmy’s eyes.