The Secret River (39 page)

One morning when the weather was turning cold Thornhill went down with a blanket for him, and a few sacks he might sleep on. When Jack glanced up at him Thornhill saw how dull his eyes were, almost with the look of a blind man, as if trying to see beyond what was in front of him, to some other place. He was so thin now he was like a bundle of sticks gathered up on the ground. Thornhill did not remember him so skinny, his ribs standing out in the barrel of his chest, the shoulderblades prominent, the flesh between fallen away.

Thornhill remembered hunger well enough. He thought a man who had once known hunger would never forget it. He dropped the blanket and the sacks beside Jack and said,
Here Jack,
keep your black arse warm
, but Jack did not so much as blink at the hearty tone.

Thornhill said,
Get yerself some tucker, up the house
. He was finding it hard not to shout. He made signals of hand-to-mouth, but could not catch Jack’s eye, said it again louder.
I give you tucker,
round the back
, making a circular gesture to show how Jack should go around the house to the kitchen. But, after that first glance, Jack did not look at him again. The smoke of his fire swirled around their heads in a flurry and cleared.

Thornhill was exasperated at the way Jack sat like a stone. When he had been hungry, no one had ever offered him the good things he knew waited for this bundle of bones in his kitchen: the fresh bread, made with his own wheat, the freshly salted pork from his own hogs, the eggs, the crisp green cabbage, the tea with plenty of sugar.
I would, mate, honest to God
, he said, his voice reasonable, the voice of a kindly man.
Plenty tucker, good bloody tucker,
mate
. He leaned down to take his arm and make him stand.
Along
you come then
.

At his touch Jack came to life.
No
, he said.

It was the first time Thornhill had ever heard him use an English word.

Jack slapped his hand on the ground so hard a puff of dust flew up and wafted away.
This me
, he said.
My place
. He smoothed the dirt with his palm so it left a patch like the scar on his head.
Sit
down hereabouts
. His face closed down then and he stared into the fire. A breath of wind shivered the leaves in a tree overhead, then stopped. In the fire, a damp stick was singing a tiny high-pitched song.

Thornhill felt a pang. No man had worked harder than he had done, and he had been rewarded for his labour. He had about him near a thousand pounds in cash, he had three hundred acres and a piece of paper to prove it was all his, and that fine house with stone lions on the gateposts. His children wore boots and he was never without a chest of best Darjeeling in the house. He would have said he had everything a man could want.

But there was an emptiness as he watched Jack’s hand caressing the dirt. This was something he did not have: a place that was part of his flesh and spirit. There was no part of the world he would keep coming back to, the way Jack did, just to feel it under him.

It was as if the very dirt was a consolation.

Anger kindled in him and he shouted,
Bugger you then, Jack, you
can bleeding well starve and good luck to you!
He tramped away up the track without looking back. He had done more than a man was obliged to. Could have shot him, the way other men would have, or had him whipped, or set the dogs on him. It was out of his hands. If that blackfeller was hungry, well, it was no fault of William Thornhill’s.

He still saw smoke from the point now and then, but he did not go down there anymore.

~

As each day ended he sat in his favourite spot on the verandah, spy-glass in his hand, watching the sunset glow red and gold on the cliffs. He had had a bench made, not too comfortable, a plain wooden bench, that was what suited him. He would have Devlin bring him a madeira on a silver tray, and a cigar. Watched the poplars in the afternoon breeze, the roses and lilacs which in the late light looked greener than during the day. There was his wall. There was his wife, in a silk gown from Armitage that had cost twenty-two guineas, taking the air along the path. He could hear the lowing of his cattle, waiting to be milked, and the shouts of his servants getting them in. Could smell the quality horseflesh in the stables behind the house. He had never ridden himself, but he had made sure his children were taught to sit a horse the way the gentry did.

Looking down at his estate it was possible to imagine it a version of England. The wall shone bright with its mortar and whitewash in the sunlight, so bright it was painful to the eyes. Foursquare, immovable, it was like a stately chord of music in this rumpled land. This was what he had worked for. He had lain awake planning, had burst his heart rowing and carrying, and here it was, given to him like the madeira: the good life.

But beyond the wall and the silver tray was another world, where the cliffs waited and watched. Above the roses and the rest
of it was the forest. The harsh whistle of the breeze in the river-oaks, the rigid stalks of the bulrushes and the reeds, that hard blue sky: they were unchanged by the speck of New South Wales enclosed by William Thornhill’s wall.

He watched Sal coming up from the garden, having paid her daily visit to the poplars, now tall enough to meet over her head. She turned to admire the drama of light and shadow playing out on the cliffs. When she caught sight of him her face softened. Her fine skin was worn and crepey now in the harsh light outside, but her smile was the same as it had been by the Thames.

Still watching?
she asked and sat beside him on the bench. He could feel her leg, warm, solid, a comfort against his, and they sat in silence. Sometimes it felt as if their bodies could speak to each other, even if they themselves could not. Then she said,
You’ll wear out the
glass, Will, the way you go on
. He did not answer. He thought she knew what it was he was watching for, and wanted to hear him say it.

She spoke a sudden thought.
You know, Will, I thought you was
wonderful, when I was a little thing
.

He could feel the air of each word separately against his face. He watched her, the smile on her face as she remembered.
Why,
pet?
he asked.
Why was I wonderful?

She laughed.
Because you spit such a long way!
she cried.
I told Da,
I says, Will Thornhill can spit such a long way!

Only Sal, in the whole world, would remember such a thing. He heard his startled laugh, the sound going around the verandah.
I ain’t lost the art, Sal
, he said.
Only in this dry place a man
needs all his spit for himself
.

After a time she got up, laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment, and went inside. He could hear the fire being lit in the parlour. In a while he would go in and sit in his armchair, enjoying the way the light gleamed around the room and shut out the night.

~

Watching the light on the cliffs was like watching the sea. Even after so long of living with them, their face was as unknowable as ever, new-formed each moment. Through the glass he would study a spot where gold and grey made a particular sort of pattern. While he looked at it, he knew that combination of rock and shadow as well as he knew the face of his wife. But if he glanced away and then tried to find it again, the light fell in a different way and it was gone. Like the ocean, it was never the same twice.

It was hard to judge of distance or size over there; the ramparts of rock could be just a little step, or a hundred feet high: the trees seemed mere saplings, crooked scrawls against the grey and gold of the cliffs. Without the advantage of a human figure over there, it was as slippery as a mirage.

Through the glass, the trees were flaked and cracked. The rocks were what seemed alive, something old and solemn out of the sea, their grey skins speckled with white lichen, creased and furrowed and ridged. Through the eye of the glass, he became acquainted with each one. He could see how those tumbled at the base of the cliff must have once been part of its lip, where the forest ended as abruptly as the edge of a table. One by one each had snapped and racketed down.

He had never seen part of the cliff fall away, although he sometimes held his breath, staring through the glass, to be watching at the moment it happened. Was it slow, the way a tree creaked away from the vertical? Or was it a clean break that sent the birds squawking up from the trees? He sat with the glass to his eye, resting his elbow on the back of a chair, until the landscape began to swim in his vision. But he had never caught a rock in the private act of falling.

There was a drama, every time, in watching the black shadow of the hill behind him—his own hill—move down across the garden, leaving everything behind in grey dusk. At the river the shadow seemed to pause in its progress. At last he would see a
line at the base of the cliffs. Then it seemed only to take a few minutes to move up and engulf the fluid shifts of light.

Sometimes the top of the cliffs, where the forest stopped as if sliced off, seemed an empty stage. And if the cliff was a stage, he was the audience. He scanned the line of forest, back and forth, up there where the stage dropped away. There could still be a few of them living up there. It was possible. Scratching a living, the way they knew, out of bark and roots, possum and lizard. Lighting their fires only at night. They could still be up there, in that intricate landscape that defeated any white man—still there, prepared to wait.

If they had wanted to be seen, he knew that he would have seen them.

Sometimes he thought he saw a man there, looking down from the clifftop. He would get to his feet and go eagerly to the edge of the verandah, would lean out squinting to see the man among so many confusing verticals. Never took his eye off the one he was sure was a human, staring down at him in his house.

He knew they had that capacity for standing in the landscape and simply being. He stared back, and reminded himself how patient they were, how much they were part of the forest. Told himself that was a man, a man as dark as the scorched trunk of a stringybark, standing on the lip of the stage, looking through the air to where he sat looking back. He strained, squinted through the glass until his eyeballs were dry.

Finally he had to recognise that it was no human, just another tree, the size and posture of a man.

Each time, it was a new emptiness.

For all it was what he had chosen, the bench he sat on here felt at times like a punishment. He had never forgotten the narrow bench in the passage at the Watermen’s Hall, where William Thornhill had sat with dread in his heart to see whether he could become an apprentice. That bench had been part of the penance
a boy paid for the chance at survival. This bench, here, where he could overlook all his wealth and take his ease, should have been the reward.

He could not understand why it did not feel like triumph.

At that late hour the wind had dropped so the river was as still as a pane of glass. The cliff rose up from the water and its reflection dropped away into it. Far over against the bank, a breeze roughened the water and made a narrow band of light between the cliff and its reflection. It separated them, or perhaps it joined them. The two cliffs completed each other into something peaceful and perfect.

He put the telescope down with a hollow feeling.
Too late, too
late
. Every day he sat here, watching, waiting, while dusk gathered in the valley, scanning the trees and the silent rocks. Until it was fully dark he could not make himself put the glass down and turn away.

He could not say why he had to go on sitting here. Only knew that the one thing that brought him a measure of peace was to peer through the telescope. Even after the cliffs had reached the moment at sunset where they blazed gold, even after the dusk left them glowing secretively with an after-light that seemed to come from inside the rocks themselves: even then he sat on, watching, into the dark.

Many people provided me with help beyond all expectation during the research for this novel, giving unstintingly of their time and knowledge. Others took time from busy lives to read the book in draft form. I am indebted to you all. The book would not have been possible without your generosity.

One of my ancestors gave me the basis for certain details in the early life of William Thornhill, and other characters share some qualities with historical figures. All the people within these pages, however, are works of fiction.

In the course of research I consulted countless documents, published and unpublished, and adapted them for my imaginative purposes. Readers of, for example, the Old Bailey transcripts for 1806, or the Governor’s dispatches from early Sydney, may recognise a few lines. I acknowledge with gratitude the work of others in making such resources available to a writer of fiction.

My great thanks go to the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney for its support during the writing of
The Secret River
.

The book could not have been written without assistance from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. I am extremely grateful for this support.