Authors: Keneally Thomas
I got up and went to the little truckle bed. Bernard stood above it, weeping. My wafer of child was sunk in it, deep as an ingot, determined already in death’s velocity to recede from us. ‘His earlier suffering was terrible,’ said Alladair, ‘but over the past two hours he has been very peaceful.’
‘For sweet Christ’s sake, why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I had crept in here and I mistook the tranquillity of the end for the beginning of a recovery, and thought it best to let you rest.’
I inspected George’s face. I could see beneath the infant features the ghost of the man who would never be.
‘Your wife however, your wife seems more settled.’
‘How would you know, sir?’ I yelled at the poor doctor. He, I thought, could bear a sympathetic face but go home to his wife and children. ‘Diphtheria is a disease of slums. It’s a disease of Manchester, for dear God’s sake. How could it come all this way, to the open bush, and take my son?’
‘The worst of ill fortune, my dear fellow. That’s how.’
I insisted on raising the feather-light body of my son and embracing him. I was demented, and this was, of all my life, the greatest agony. This, I thought, is what people mean when they call something insupportable. I could not support this grief. I felt my body melting beneath it. I looked to Bernard but in her eyes, blurred themselves by loss, there
was nothing to aid me. I wanted my heart to stop, and my soul to find hell.
The doctor persuaded me to let go of George. My next impulse was to flee the house, to go raging amongst those boulders, to be impaled by those screaming winds, and to discover at last, beyond a ridge somewhere, this very moment, this very room again, but with the scene altered, my inheritor, my boy, having woken from profound sleep and saying in joyful recognition, ‘Papa’.
‘Steady, Bettany,’ said Alladair, taking firm hold of my arm. ‘Be brave. Think of your wife.’
That morning Dr Alladair permitted me to emerge from the house – I had clearly outlasted some phase of quarantine he had in his head. I saw my men move around the outbuildings, and heard Maggie Tume yelling from the men’s cookhouse. In this clear, sharp day, currawongs shouted from the tall eucalypts whose every branch stood out in the clear air, whose every leaf was a dun spear point. I called for Clancy. We had got beyond improvised coffins. There was a man in Cooma who made polished and decorated ones. Clancy was to go to town with my son’s height – two feet five inches – written on a sheet of paper and bring back one, waiting should the man need to make one specially. While the coffin was being prepared, he was to let Mr Paltinglass know that we had lost our adored son, and place in the fledgling
Cooma Courier
a memorial notice I had written. I warned Clancy most grimly against stopping on the way or the return at the public house newly established just north of Mount Bulwa station.
For the moment, George lay in the same room as Phoebe, who had utterly lost the wit and the strength to ask about him. In the parlour Bernard fed Alladair and myself a meal of bacon and fried bread and tea. Taking back my plate barely quarter-eaten from me, she said, ‘Let us pray for Mrs Bettany, sir. A man as young and strong as you will have other children.’ Had anyone else – Alladair, for example – suggested that, I would have become engorged with rage. But since it came from Bernard I madly set myself almost to considering that halfway a prophecy, a divine chastisement, and a cause of minute hope.
I had Long get the phaeton ready – it was appropriate as overseer he should attend the funeral with me. When I had bought this vehicle it had been in expectation of Phoebe, myself and our children proceeding in it
to town for special occasions, to cricket matches and picnic race meetings. Now it was my son’s tiny body which, coffined, was to travel roped to the ledge behind the main seat.
Before I left I went to say goodbye to Phoebe, finding her in a state of maternal clarity. Her eyes glazed with intelligence. ‘George is gone,’ she told me, and her face became sodden with grief. I caressed her, I kissed her forehead. I gathered her thin body off the pillows, embraced it, repented of my delusions. I said the usual things: the little fellow was with God, had died without suffering, but that she must not deprive me of son
and
wife, that she must recover, for her sake, mine, for the sake of unborn children amongst whom we would keep George’s name green.
‘You are going,’ she acknowledged. ‘But you are coming back?’
‘I shall be back before night.’
‘If you are back by night, my love, I shall make sure I am here to greet you.’
Abased and weeping, I left her in Bernard’s care and took myself out to the four-wheeler phaeton. Felix was there, wearing boots and a jacket, and with moist eyes. Since he seemed, by the standards of Nugan Ganway, dressed for the funeral, I asked him, ‘Would you come with Long and George and me, Felix?’
‘With you and the little bloke,’ he said. I recognised the phrase. Presscart had always called George ‘the little bloke’.
Felix climbed into the carriage, his back holding the little polished coffin in place. Long, helping me board, inspected me carefully, as if loss had turned me into yet another person.
‘You’re such a good fellow, Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘that God should be kinder.’
I raised a hand to prevent any other honest and quaintly phrased condolences from him. He climbed into the driver’s seat, shook the reins, and the bright-cried currawongs and magpies mocked us on our way.
George was amongst the first of the scatter of young to be placed in the new churchyard at Cooma, and to have the benefit of the earnest, East Anglian-accented prayers of the Reverend Paltinglass, whose ceremonial style was a comfort to me and both sharpened and soothed my grief. Paltinglass and the editor of the new Cooma newspaper had between them spread the news of the Bettany calamity, and my old friend Peske, the District Commissioner, was there, full of suppressed excitement since he had just been given a post in Madras. Cooma Creek’s first police magistrate and his family also attended.
After we saw George into the earth, Long supported me back to the parlour of the very manse in which George had been born. Family by family the mourners left, men and women muttering their helpless condolence. As the wind mounted outside I began to dread the coming bereaved night. But at least I had a simple contract to fulfil – to return to Phoebe by nightfall.
With Paltinglass’s priestly best wishes, Felix, Long and I rose to the cushioned seat of the phaeton. Climbing the hill a mile out of town, I stood in my seat to reach for a cap beneath it, and was bent over in a very insecure posture when the wheels hit a large stone. I felt Felix clutch at my coat tails, but he could not stop me pitching head first from the vehicle onto the track. The disturbance caused the horses to bolt, and Long passed the reins to Felix and jumped down to run beside them and try to catch hold of their heads. But he could not manage it. With Felix their hostage, the horses left the track and galloped uphill, reduced to their untamed instincts, and making for a wooded spur to the right.
Sitting up in the dust, shaking my head, I saw with some dread that Felix was rising to abandon the vehicle. I wanted him to remain amongst the upholstered cushions rather than take that risk. But with the cushions spewing forth around him, he jumped to the ground and landed with grace. The phaeton disappeared over the rise, and vanished towards its ruination.
My head was ringing from the fall. Long limped, but Felix ran to us. ‘I undertook to be with Mrs Bettany by dark,’ I told Long.
The phaeton, if still intact, might be miles off by the time we found it. But we were a mile from the new public house along the track, Long reminded me, and suggested the three of us walk there. In the tap room were a few of Treloar’s stockmen, who grew reverently silent as we entered. So they had heard the news of George. I asked the innkeeper, by rumour a former London burglar, whether there might be someone there who could loan me a horse. ‘Now you mention that,’ he told me, ‘we’ve Mr ’arrington from Yass.’
I remembered the name; the man was a station agent I had met once in Barley’s company in Sydney. He was fetched from the parlour and offered me his black mare, asking only that one of my men return the horse the next day.
I was strangely more consoled by the kindnesses of these strangers, the stockmen, the innkeeper, Harrington, than I had been by the funeral rite from
The Book of Common Prayer
, and gained hope again for Phoebe.
I gave Felix and Long a sovereign to buy them dinner and, if necessary, accommodation, and told them I would send horses for them in the morning. They were to find the phaeton or its wreckage and retrieve or, if necessary, shoot the horses. Then I rode off. Four miles along the road, as I mounted the side of a stony hill, another sign of hope. I saw off to the right my carriage and its two horses, their reins caught in the front wheel and a broken trace conveniently preventing forward progress. The dashboard was shattered and sundry cushions could be seen strewn about the hillside, but Long would have little trouble finding and repairing it tomorrow.
There was still plenty of light as I splashed on the good mare across the ford of the Murrumbidgee. As I came into the front parlour, Bernard was feeding logs to the fire. She read me with dark eyes. ‘God bless you, Mr Bettany,’ she said outright, in that strange way of hers, blunt yet elegant. ‘Your wife has been asking.’
I went in with renewed hope to Phoebe. But it seemed that only her eyes had any capacity for movement, and she was already, I hated to see, a wraith. A mocking God had preserved my phaeton but would not preserve my wife. All that had happened that afternoon had been a series of divine teases, not gracious omens of hope.
I held Phoebe’s hand. ‘George is at rest,’ I said, and with a sudden surge of belief which would have done honour to Mr Paltinglass. ‘He would greet you in paradise, but he wishes you should live and remember him.’
She tried to speak through that pernicious veil which was crimping all her powers of voice and breath. ‘But he is lying in that cold place,’ she whispered.
All belief fled. ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘He has ascended.’
After preparing a meal for which I lacked appetite, Bernard intended to be Phoebe’s night nurse again. The contrast between this noble office, and the more intimate one my base mind had previously devised for her, chastened me. I thought of my father and Stoicism. What had Father quoted to me before I rode off from Simon’s? Some rubbish of Epictetus. ‘Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.’ Want the death of your son, and your life will go well! Want your wife to choke, and your life will go well!
That night I set myself wakefully, on top of the covers, wrapped in a rug, at Phoebe’s side. I watched her by lamplight, how fine-featured she
was even in this extremity of disease. I allowed myself to sleep for no longer than ten minutes at a time. Thus, I was awake at two o’clock in the morning when, by the stump of candle that was left, I saw her straining to sit. Her breathing was strangled. ‘George has come back anyhow,’ she told me.
I denied it, but her face was full of delirious certainty. ‘I knew the Moth people would not keep him. They are too kindly.’ She began to choke, and as I tried to restrain her, and make her rest against my shoulder, a convulsion set in, arching her body. Then all the tension of the disease left her in a second. I was stupid enough to think her better.
Bernard removed the shawls and nightdress from my wife’s tiny shell. I saw with unspeakable regret and remorse the breasts which had fed George, the stomach which had borne him, that girlish abdomen, and the mound of hair marking her womanhood, her motherhood.
‘I’ll look after the washing and laying out, Mr Bettany,’ said Bernard. ‘You should go outside and take some brandy.’
Through tears I said, ‘You have been very good to us, Bernard. You might have caught the disease yourself.’
‘It is an honour to serve a noble woman.’ Bernard told me. ‘It is for the crimes of others she has been punished.’
I went to the parlour and obeyed Bernard by pouring some brandy. As I drank I was sharply aware that in the next room the body of my wife, whom I had vowed to cherish unto death, was receiving its last mercies from the woman I had wantonly desired.
I was not fit to travel after the Reverend Paltinglass had committed Phoebe’s coffin, itself remarkably small, like a young girl’s, to the same alluvial pit in the churchyard at Cooma Creek as George’s. I wrote to Mrs Finlay with the grievous news, but there was hardly time for her to have received the letter. We had not taken the chance of any more phaeton accidents and lashed the coffin, with Phoebe’s wraithlike, stiffened body within it, to the tray of the bullock wagon. Alladair, who bravely attended the funeral despite the risk that I might begin ranting, unjustly or otherwise, at him, took me back to the Paltinglass manse as if I were an elderly person. Good Paltinglass sent his young children to bed early, lest their fresh complexions cause me to rail like Job. Alladair, with the connivance of Mr and Mrs Paltinglass fed me whisky and a dose of some opiate which utterly felled me. I would not later remember who
had helped me to the bedroom I occupied that night.
Riding back to Nugan Ganway the next afternoon with a sombre Felix, I became aware of the unfamiliarity of my own self. It was as if I had met a plausible stranger, someone I did not choose to know better. I was aware of a parallel strangeness in the landscape about me. I did not wish to occupy that landscape. I had become so estranged from the world I had once so coveted. It could no longer provide me with an outer skin. I shook out the reins impatiently.
In the house that evening, I was aware that Bernard, who had not attended the funeral, had packed away all traces of Phoebe and George in sundry chests. Their ghosts occupied the death room, if at all, in the faint smell of naphtha.
‘You may return to your normal pursuits now,’ I told Bernard.