Remembering Babylon (16 page)

In these last months they had grown apart. He was already aware of a change in her, but it was now, in this company, that he saw how great it might be. He had taken for granted always that their lives were intertwined, by which he meant that her chief concern must be him. She did nothing to deny it, but was absorbed, he saw, in a world of her own that he had no part in. He caught looks between her and his aunt that had not been there before, and when he burst in upon them once, with his usual expectation of welcome, was surprised by the faces they turned to him, which were attentive but subtly closed.

It had struck him then, and for the first time, that there might be areas of experience that he was not intended to enter. That closed look marked only the closest and most gently guarded of them. Beyond lay others that had never heard of him and never would hear.

He was shaken. In the revelation that a power he had taken for granted in himself might have limitations, he felt much of it fall away.

Meanwhile, here at the table, Janet met his eyes and flushed with embarrassment. Not surely for him!

He found an excuse to get away, though Leona protested. Gemmy went with him, and they walked a little way on the road together. They barely spoke. Gemmy was sick. He too felt sick at heart. He promised to return but knew that he would not, and Gemmy knew it too. They stood a moment, then he turned and moved away.

He looked back once and saw that Gemmy too had turned, about sixty yards off, and they faced one another down the white ribbon of track. They were too far off to be more to one another than figures whose eyes, whose real dimensions even, were lost to distance.

For years afterwards he would have dreams in which he would stand trying, against the fact of distance, to see the look on Gemmy’s face, and once or twice, in his dream, he walked back through the white dust, which rose in ghostly spirals around him, and went right up to where he was standing, and looked into his face. But it remained as blurred as it had been from sixty yards off, and he woke with his cheeks wet, even after so long, though he was no longer a child.

A
FTER THREE YEARS
in the north, Mr Frazer was delighted with Brisbane. The service at Marr’s Boarding House was cheerful, the jug and basin on the washstand a wonderful guarantee of the amenities, clear water, steaming hot in the mornings, and the soup at the
table d’hôte
agreeably thick.

The little town was very little, not much more really than a village, and this surprised him considering the almost mystical importance they attached to it ‘up there’, but impressive monuments were in sight. They were shadowy as yet behind scaffolding, but one or two of them had stepped clear and stood broad-fronted and substantial above the verandahed hotels and weatherboard bank buildings and stores, the picket fences, and rutted, rather twisty lanes where, on his morning walk to the top of a wooded ridge, he met barefooted youths driving cows.

The Governor, he soon discovered, was a very visible figure. He dashed about the unpaved streets in a gleaming chariot, wearing epaulettes and a sword, and gave the impression, with his ramrod stance and lean profile, of being the embodiment of a distant, almost unapproachable power. But when Mr Frazer presented himself at Government House, it was Sir George himself who looked out of a window and called him in.

It was as if he had arrived at a rundown country mansion, Palladian in style but with household arrangements that appeared to be Irish, or perhaps the climate had something to do with it; the day was sultry. Toys and flowers with their heads off lay scattered about the entrance hall, which otherwise was very empty – a child’s hobbyhorse, several
wooden animals. There were scurryings in side rooms and a woman’s voice raised in complaint.

Sir George came out and seemed irritated by the commotion. Ignoring Mr Frazer and the startled footman, he flung open a door, stood glaring, and the scufflings ceased; but his face, when he turned, remained peevish, and Mr Frazer had the impression, a flash, no more, not of a naval man retired early but of a dignified upper servant who had been caught in his master’s clothes and was convinced, if he was overbearing enough, that he would get away with it. ‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, with sudden affability, ‘do come in. I’m delighted.’

The interview that followed was a puzzle to Mr Frazer. He felt that he had never quite got the hang of it, or of Sir George either.

Sir George, having recovered his poise, appeared a fine, bluff fellow, not so old as you might have thought, and not at all stiff; he invited you to be entirely open with him. But Mr Frazer was disconcerted, just the same, by the line of questioning he took. He had written earlier, no doubt, to Mr Herbert – it was Mr Herbert who had set him on to make this
report
? No? Then it was one or other of the people up there (the Governor pushed about a pile of papers he had before him and seemed more and more put out) whom of course he had complete knowledge of – Mr McIntosh, perhaps, one of the O’Hares? It occurred to Mr Frazer after a moment that he was suspected of being an emissary, a secret one, though Sir George had nosed him out, of forces that Sir George was at war with, and who were always, by one means or another, trying to get under his guard. Sir George fixed him with a hurt look, accusatory blue. Am I right sir? Have I found you out?

Not at all, he insisted. He had come here entirely in his own right, on behalf – very briefly, though he feared not briefly enough, he tried to describe Gemmy, who was not very easily describable; how the man, through his knowledge of native life, had led him etc … It was enough anyway to satisfy Sir George that he was not one of a cabal, yet another
subverter of the great design, and that his report was not part of a plan to entrap and discredit him.

But once the report was rendered harmless Sir George lost interest in it, and in Gemmy too. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘an interesting case – they are interesting people –’ but a moment later they had leapt to Hesiod and arrived, before Mr Frazer had quite caught up, at Homer, a frequent destination, he guessed, in Sir George’s conversational flights.

Sir George’s commission here is to call into existence a new self-governing state; in a land, territory rather, about the size of France and all the Germanies combined, wild, cut in two by the southern tropic, and largely, as yet, unpeopled. He is alternately intoxicated by the largeness of the undertaking and depressed that in being set down, at more than forty, at the ends of the earth, he may drop from sight. To keep his name before the Lords in Westminster he writes to one or another of them almost daily, describing in grandiloquent terms, all classical allusion and analogy, the names he has bestowed on a nameless part of the empire, the towns he has founded, the laws laid down. He sees himself as a kind of imperial demiurge, out of mere rocks and air creating spaces where history may now occur – at once the Hesiod of the place, its Solon, and its antipodean Pericles.

The archaic and the classical, indeed the prehistoric and the classical, exist side by side here and in the same moment. Sir George finds it entirely understandable that in the little coastal port he has honoured with his name a crocodile has been seen to emerge from the mud and waddle unperturbed about the main street, and that in his capital of a mere five thousand souls the monuments he is building, dome and portico, rise in incongruous glory above the backs of bullock teams, the curses of their drivers, and under the gaze of creatures, only recently redeemed from nakedness, whose minds are still sunk in unfathomable night.

They are in the age of wonders here, where forms, nameless as yet, are just beginning to emerge out of the dark, the dreamlike: the age of the hippogriff and demogorgon, of the heroes and demigods, too, of future legend, who just happen
to have names like Jones and Dalrymple, and wear moleskins, or, as he does, the uniform of Her Majesty’s Colonial Service. ‘Your town,’ he writes to his patron, Lord Cardwell, of the little mosquito-infested port in the north on which he has settled that great man’s name, ‘lies in a position analogous to that of Thermopylae; that is, at the north end of the Australian Epirus’. In his mind, as it soars and hangs eagle-like over the great expanse of past and future, the local squattocracy, rough fellows most of them, are his squatter kings. ‘Runs (the colonial term for a wide-ranging pasture)’ he informs one of his Lordships, ‘seems a literal translation of
of Homer, where the shepherd kings feed their cattle in a similar climate to that of Arcadia. How refreshing among my daily cares are these classical analogies.’ Being escorted into a little western town of nine pubs and a butcher shop, by a party of two hundred stockmen, he sees himself riding in the company of attendant centaurs. Analogy is his drug. He finds it everywhere.

At eighteen he fell in love with the Mediterranean. Twenty years later he married into it. Lady Bowen, Roma Diamantina, is the daughter of the President of the Senate of Corfu, the Count Candiano di Roma.

Queensland, one has to say, was not Sir George’s first choice, but he is determined to make the most of it. He refuses to be put off by its failure at times to come up to the mark. His own mind knows no bounds. He is monstrously ambitious. What he fears is that if he is too successful here he will be taken for granted and overlooked; but there are occasions when he fears even more that he may be
exposed
, since the secret that gnaws his soul, child as he is of a Donegal rectory, is that he is an imposter.

Sir George, easy now, reaches behind him and slips from a shelf two little volumes of which he is himself the very modest author. Mr Frazer is impressed.

One is an argument in favour of the present island of Ithaca as the site of Homer’s island; the other an account of a journey on horseback, across Thessaly and the High Pindus, from Constantinople to Corfu. Sir George, it appears, has
stood at the summit of all three classical peaks, Etna, Parnassus, Mount Olympus – a feat no other Briton has emulated. But when he opens the atlas he has recently commissioned, and they look together at the town there that bears Sir George’s name, Mr Frazer, remembering the scattered huts along the shore and the listless air about the jetty he sailed from, for he knows the actual place, feels his confidence in the Governor take a downward turn. A kind of gloom comes over him. Sir George, he decides, exudes an air of magnificent unreality that includes everything he looks upon. He has got close enough to feel its disintegrating effect in every part of him.

They do come back to his report, Sir George
has
read it. Perhaps now, Mr Frazer thinks, taking a firm hold on his own sinking spirits, we will get down to facts. In all this heady leaping about the globe he had grown more and more conscious of Gemmy, poor fellow; so real in the room that he can almost smell him, and, in a malicious moment, wishes Sir George could too.

But Sir George has no interest in facts. He takes the long view, the long
high
view, and from there, since his mind has the same capacity to leap centuries into the future as back into the past, the whole of time being its sphere, the vision Mr Frazer has outlined in his report of orchards, not of exotic (that is, European) but of native fruit, stretching in all directions to the skyline, had long since passed the arguing and planning stage, the clearing and grafting and seed-and-sapling stage, and is, in Sir George’s mind, accomplished. To descend to detail would be to miss the wood for the scrubby little trees. That sort of thing he leaves to those who have a talent for it, who love to burrow and bury themselves (he is glaring again) in minutiae, dull fellows, dull facts. Recovering quickly, he beams at Mr Frazer, whom he sees as a man, after all, consumed by an idea, with no one behind him, a man he can trust. He expresses his entire satisfaction with their little talk and invites him to dinner where he will have the pleasure (Sir George looks humorous) of meeting the Premier, Mr Herbert – and Lady Bowen, of course. Thursday then, seven sharp.

But at this descent to mere detail Sir George grows gloomy again, suspicious – or perhaps a new barb has found its mark and is working its slow poison in him. When Mr Frazer gets up to leave he has set his jaw and is gazing irascibly out the window towards the dispiriting bushland of the opposing shore.

Two nights later, in the prettily furnished dining room at Government House, they are four at table: Sir George; Lady Bowen, a fine, tall, dark-haired woman, not quite beautiful but with splendid shoulders and eyes; Mr Frazer himself; and the Premier, Mr Herbert, a very young man with soft fair hair and a large head, who has walked in the three miles from Herston, his estate on the edge of town, with his dog, Skip, and a basket of fresh vegetables.

Mr Herbert lives at Herston with his friend of Oxford days, Mr Bramston. The house, with its animals and its model garden, is a joint enterprise, as is suggested by the merging of the young men’s names – a Horatian retreat for Mr Herbert from the rough and tumble of colonial democracy, which he does not believe in, and the game, which does not quite suit him, of state-making.

Mr Herbert, the only son of the fifth son of an Earl, is in all ways the gentleman amateur, but one, Sir George finds, who has set out, almost in the spirit of contradiction, to be rigorously professional in everything he does. It is a matter of character. He is painstaking, dedicated, self-effacing and smug – this is Sir George’s view, who suspects him, correctly as it happens, of reporting unfavourably upon him to his great family at home.

Mr Herbert, who has a good deal to put up with, regards Sir George as a madman, but one he has a kind of responsibility for: an autocratic, impulsive, obstinate, ceremoniously pedantic, fantastical, profoundly humourless man with only one gift, a strong but inconvenient memory, which nature has bestowed upon him in compensation, it would appear, for his entire lack of sense.

The two men are as different as they can be.

Sir George is hungry for office and has a premonition
already that the higher forms of it will elude him; not, he believes, through any fault of his own but through neglect, not to say malice, at home.

Mr Herbert is made for success but winces at it. He does not despise office, even high office, but his austere nature and distaste for every sort of public display means that he would prefer it to be anonymous; what his soul craves is privacy. He is weary of his term here, which he looks upon already as an adventure of his youth. He is weary of Sir George and his infantile vanities and
crises ministérielles
. He is even weary, at times, of the little boat in which, since he is fond of the outdoors and all manly pursuits, he likes to skip about on the waters of the bay, and of Herston, the fifty acres of Cambridgeshire he has established in a place that, once he leaves it, he will not revisit. All of which, and more, is in the air as the servants move behind them at table.

Mr Frazer has the sense of being an intruder here among people who have been too long shut up together, have already said everything they can bear to say to one another and are speaking in code.

‘Really, Mr Frazer,’ says Lady Bowen, ‘you should see Herston.’ (They are eating some of the Herston vegetables, so the subject has arisen quite naturally.) ‘You would think yourself in England. The peaches! So plump, and with such a blush on the skin. Even at Corfu we had nothing like them. We are very gay when we go to Herston. Mr Herbert has a machine for making ice brought all the way from India, from which he makes, with his own hands –’ the word, on the lady’s breath, hangs a little, so that Mr Frazer is aware of the knuckles in young Mr Herbert’s broad hands as he works his knife and fork – ‘the most delicious water-ice. The children are very fond of water-ice. Especially little George.’