A River Town (18 page)

But when Tim inspected it the photograph had changed to something normal. All the lightning had gone from it. He saw there an altered, ordinary young woman who would see old age. A woman with an ordered life ahead. It could be told just by looking at her that she would not be hauled around the country by a bewildered constable. Hard for Tim to know now how the mistake had been made.

“I’m sorry,” he told Kitty, shivering. “I made an awful mistake. I’m sorry.”

Wooderson said. “No, don’t give it a thought. It’s heat prostration and the shock.”

“He’s sensitive to these things,” Kitty explained to Wooderson and Mrs. Malcolm. “To a fault, you know. Too much of a poet.”

Tim saw Winnie Malcolm’s rose-pink lips purse, going along with Kitty’s judgment.

The young admirer received his photograph back from Kitty, and went and put it away in his jacket with scarcely any show of grievance.

Someone—not Kitty—brought a cushion for Tim’s head. Perhaps it was Mrs. Malcolm again, but he could not be sure.

“No need for you to field, Tim,” said Wooderson. “You’ve done the brave task with your batting.”

Tim lay back on the utterly comfortable earth now of New South Wales. People drifted away from him, as if from a kind of respect. He felt very much at one with this ground, with the way it harboured him beneath branches.

“There’s been surprises, eh?” he heard Kitty say, the words trailing over his face like fingers. “But it’s sweet here. Take a rest, Mr. Shea.”

He drowsed. Of course, he’d made a fool of himself and been punished for inaction by Missy. Yet under the sun, she receded from his mind now. The whole farce of it, her face jumping out at him from a usual photo. But chastised now, he
could
have a licensed break in the shade. His wife beside him, hands folded, in a canvas chair she’d dragged over for the sake of being near.

Jesus, he and Kitty would rest here in the absolute end as well. This fact struck him for the first intimate time. No going back to reclaim soggier ground in Duhallow. This was the earth which would take them. And they would feed this ground. He lay close down to it, and it seemed to him to yield slightly as if it were in on the realisation too.

“Mother of God,” Kitty told him after a time. “They are having a tossing-the-ball-at-the-stumps contest out there. And that bloody scamp Johnny’s involved. Crikey, he has an arm on him! Where did he get that from?”

And she recounted to him as it happened, how their son kept hitting the wicket from all angles and from thirty yards out, then forty yards out. The men were whistling Johnny for his sure eye. He and some great lump of a farmer were left in the contest at the end, and the farmer won. But it seemed to Tim that Johnny had made a claim on things, on Australia itself, with his true eye. As he himself now made the same claim by his tranquil lying-down, his New South Wales holiday in the shade.

“Couldn’t you just see him playing the toff’s game? That Johnny. Wearing creams. You know, I won’t be going on
Burrawong
unless you’re well.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Of course I’m bloody well, and you’ll travel saloon. And your sister too.”

Mamie Kenna travelling saloon. Poshly into the valley of plenty.

YOU WOULD THINK a fellow’s reputation as a cricketer would pause the pace of the world for him for at least a few weeks. But it wasn’t so, and he knew it wouldn’t be either. The question of attending the loyal meeting to do with Macleay lancers or bush battalions had had a certain light thrown on it by the mail arrived from
Burrawong
. Amongst a shovelful of accounts and catalogues, a letter written the previous November by his father, Jeremiah.

Tim was still pensive from the seizure he’d taken at the cricket, and was fit to receive the patriarchal letter. Distance too, of course, gave it more force, and Jeremiah wrote with such graciousness as well. Famous for it in his locality and amongst his family.

Thanks for the two sovereigns so gratefully received
.

Tim was all at once turned into a staid citizen by a sentence like that. If ruined, he could always go back to hauling to support Kitty and the children. But then where would the two sovereigns so gratefully received be found? On top of the fifty bob he was paying Imelda for the child?

So where was the harm in a man turning his face for a second towards the oratory of such city fathers as Baylor and Chance, Good Templars and patriots to something or other?

In the same batch of letters, one from Truscott and Lowe saying how much they had valued his custom, but that his account with them was in arrears by in excess of seventeen pounds. From the cash box in the store, he had perhaps enough to send them a soothing tenner, and ask them to bear with him two weeks for the rest. But keep enough to hold off his other chief supplier, Staines and Gould. If people like Imelda paid an occasional token and the Malcolms and others paid two monthly instead of three, he could meet Truscott and Lowe’s account in full. He would need to go out to rattle the tin at his customers.

Kitty of course found and read the Truscott and Lowe account. Other men were able to sequester that sort of correspondence from their wives. No bloody chance with Kitty.

And government interference in the business of keeping a store! NOTICE TO STOREKEEPERS ran in all the papers. Trading hours to be enforced by exemplary fines. Selling after six o’clock: fifteen pounds! The government of New South Wales trying to keep people off the streets after dark. Don’t put troops on the corners—that didn’t suit the temper of Australian life. But close the shops and fine the poor shopkeepers.

In any case, in this complicated world, he resolved he would go to the Patriotic Fund meeting for safety’s sake, just to observe. The Offhand would be surprised when he appeared. But the fact was there was no reason, in a land where he had considerable freedoms, why a fellow like him couldn’t attach himself to the same drama as true Britons like Chance. To feel for a short time
right in
with the drama—the grieving loss of a glaring battle here and there. The joyous winning of trudging wars.

The afternoon of the meeting, back from deliveries, he saw Hanney just sitting a horse outside the Commercial Hotel.

In the back, releasing Pee Dee from the traces and taking him into his pasture, he saw his four-year-old daughter Annie rise in a white pinafore of sacking from where she was sitting on the back step, and come with her hand out to fetch him. Her solidly composed face looked as though she had a complaint. He could hear Kitty singing in the dining room.

He could tell that Annie, who got her air of reserve from him, thought that singing immoderate. A rough but resonant voice. Girlish in some of its register, full and mature in others. The voice of someone from a comic variety show.

In wonder at what he might find, he led the child inside. She was clinging though. So in they went. Observing herself in a handheld mirror, Kitty stood by the sand-soaped table, swathed in yellow cloth. It ran crookedly around her legs, her hips, her upper body, and made a cowl over her head. She looked splendid but alien, like an Indian, or the women he had seen in Colombo when coming out on the SS
Ayrshire
.

“Oh, Tim,” she said lightly.

“What are you doing in that bloody cloth?” he asked, trying to sound half-amused. “Where did you get it?”

Still regarding herself but at least dropping the cloth back from her head, Kitty said, “Mr. Habash, you know. The hawker. I invited him in to show me material.”

“Show you? Smother you in the stuff!”

“Don’t you understand? After the child, I’ll be needing new clothes. You know that. I’ve let the old out as far as they’ll go.” She patted her abdomen. “Don’t you see I have to prepare for the little scoundrel. You were keen enough on the making of him.”

Had the hawker bedecked her? Or had his visit made her flighty enough to do it herself? Tim was frightened by the strangeness Bandy Habash had brought into Kitty’s behaviour, and angry he was not still there to be expelled from the premises.

“What if a customer came in and heard all that hooting out here in yellow cloth?”

“I’d say that I owe him the supply of kerosene and butter and soap. But nothing says I can’t sing as much as I bloody like!”

She ran her stubby little fingers over the cloth. He wouldn’t mind betting she had also bought a fresh bottle of some mad Punjabi elixir as well. He’d found the bottles in the past. Now he walked up, held her by the shoulder and unwrapped her. Beneath the golden extravagance, she wore a dress of white muslin. He let the swathes fall on the floor. “How many yards is this?” he asked.

“I needed four,” she told him, unabashed, firm. “I can use it for Anne’s dresses too.”

“There are other bloody hawkers, you know.”

“And I have regard for what they cost. Do you want me to run up a bill? I can certainly manage that but normally leave it to you.”

Again, a blow delivered. Kitty was landing all of them. He had no chance of successful rage, since the bloody little Punjabi was gone.

“You should understand,” he told her, “I’ve already warned Mr. Habash off.”

“And I’m supposed to know. Read it in the
Argus
I suppose.”

The bell in the shop began to ring. Someone had come in wanting something. Kitty processed out, her small hands joined in front of the bulge beneath her breasts.

Tim was restless with this slow, uneasy rage. To help contain and diffuse it he sat down at the table and read the
Chronicle
. Habash made all a man’s Britishness rise in him. You were going pretty well to do that in an Irishman. Bandy made you think of regiments, flashes of scarlet, take that you Dervish dogs! Such feelings
came in handy for spiking up his enthusiasm for tonight’s meeting.

Good Templars’ Hall, Smith Street, Kempsey: centre of civic enthusiasms. Of sandstone quarried by the prisoners at Trial Bay, it rose two storeys and had a Greek architrave in which the symbol of masonry, the compass, had its place.

Approaching it by the gas lanterns lit by Tapley, who had once done the Empire’s time, you couldn’t see stars, and you felt you were a squat, solid citizen in a low-ceilinged world. You forgot your half-shameful, half-just rancour against the hawker and fixed on other questions. Whether to wear a tie and dress as a player in that world, or an open collar as a spectator, a contemplative observer of tonight’s argument? He’d decided on a tie, but worn casually, the top button undone. And please don’t ask me for a donation to the Patriotic Fund! I gave all I had to Imelda. The Irish Empire. The British Empire needs to get in line.

“Sure you want to go?” Kitty asked. “Look a bit weird you being there.”

“I’m going to hear the Offhand,” he said, telling part of the truth.

“Don’t you dare enlist,” she warned him as a joke. As if the Macleay’s contingent would be enlisted by the end of the meeting and marched straight past the enthusiastic citizens of the Shire to embark on the
Burrawong
for Cape Town or Durban!

An immense crowd inside, barely a seat left. The Offhand was already there, flushed with his evening’s drink, and holding very visibly a notebook and shorthand pencil, recording names. The names of people whose ties were done up, the names of the well-suited. Constable Hanney patrolling a side aisle, sober and unburdened tonight, without Missy, without a bewildered spouse. And on the platform, dapper M. M. Chance, and old Mr. Baylor, father of a tormented chemist in West who—the year before—had killed himself by accident, through drinking laudanum. Now Mr. Baylor was all suited up to show the Boers he meant business. To give them indirectly the hell which would be delivered in person through the hands of sleeper-cutters and dairy farmers’ sons. Why
not go himself and bully them into becoming opium-eaters like his poor son?

Chance had a pleasant, smooth face, and the capacity to dress up his ideas in very appeasing language. He was a widower with two daughters everyone called brilliant. One sang duets with Dr. Erson, the second was a famous painter of the East Kempsey swamp and of the river. Chance was supporting her now as she painted in Paris, which as a city was, according to the
Argus
, very pro-Boer.