Corroboree (9 page)

With that strange non sequitur, she bustled off, all curling-papers and flowery skirts, to fetch the jug and the basin, and the Keatings Salve, which she always swore was so effective that it ‘could heal a severed leg'.

Eyre lay back on his narrow iron-framed bed, still trembling with shock. The bite in his leg hurt the most; a penetrating ache that felt as if the metal teeth of a kangaroo-snare had been embedded in his thigh. His right eye had almost closed up, and when he touched his cheek, he could feel a crust of dried blood on it. He supposed that he ought to undress himself, ready for Mrs McCornnell's nursing, but somehow he felt too sensitive, as if he wasn't going to be able to bear the sensation of moving his sleeves over his skin.

‘Oh, God,' he whispered. Then, even more softly, ‘Oh, Charlotte.'

He looked around him; and his room, through half-focused eyes, had the blurriness of a room in a dream. It was plain enough, wallpapered with brown-and-white flowers, with a cheap varnished bureau; and a bedside table that had once belonged on the SS
Titania
, complete with brass handles and tobacco-pipe burns; and a carved mahogany wardrobe that looked as if it had been the only entry in a competition for upright coffins. Beside him, enhancing the blurriness with a halo of light, stood an oil-lamp with an engraved glass globe, and beneath it, his small brass carriage-clock, and the two oval-framed
daguerreotypes of his mother and his father; the first long dead and the second far away.

Eyre looked at the picture of his mother and for the first time in two years his eyes filled with tears. He felt suddenly alone, and hurt, and further away from Derbyshire than he could ever remember. He couldn't even assuage his grief by laying flowers on his mother's grave. But he could think of the rain, and the green silent hills of Baslow and Bakewell; and he could still remember those days as a boy when he had sat watching a distant rainbow, and his mother had gently touched his shoulder, and said, ‘God's paintbox, Eyre, that's what it is.'

And now he lay here shivering, thinking of Charlotte, erotic but innocent, tempting but afraid; and of his mother, calm but dead. He thought of time, and how quickly it had passed and taken his mother's life away and how his small brass carriage-clock was measuring his own life away, second by second, month by month, unceasingly.

His father had been the vicar of St Crispin's, in Baslow. Thin-faced, with drawn-in cheeks, and old-fashioned side-whiskers, and a row of black silk-faced buttons in front that must have taken him ten minutes each morning to fasten. The Reverend Leonard Walker, dry and determined, the one and only messenger of God. Conscientious, grave, a believer in angels and Holy Grails; and also in the life everlasting, at least for those who were saved. And he, of course, was the only agency through which the people of Baslow could achieve salvation.

He would take Eyre for walks: miles across the Dales, in rain or sleet or misty sunshine. But the walks were not for enjoyment or for exercise; they were visits to the poor; to dribbling grannies or Mongol children; or to vermin-ridden cottages where filthy women suckled filthier children, and where fathers mounted their daughters, night after night, with the energy born of desperation, regardless of what the Bible might say; or of how many idiot children they might conceive. And the Reverend Leonard Walker would rest his dry, thin-fingered hands on their lousy
heads, and bless them; and accept their gifts of salt pork and lardy-cakes; but leave them in no doubt whatsoever when he said goodbye tht he would expect them in church that Sunday, to save their miserable souls.

Eyre had been brought up in the gloom of the vicarage and the light of God. He had sat at his desk on hot summer afternoons, dressed in thick woollen socks and buttoned-up jackets, watching the days pass him by through closed windows, his nail-bitten hands resting on his open copy of
Pilgrim's Progress
.' Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.' And the pendulum-clock on the wall had measured his childish weariness hour by hour; until it was time for supper; and prayers; and bed.

By the time he was ten, Eyre had felt that life was nothing but tedious duty, of silent meals with grace to begin them and grace to end them, and of books with no pictures.

He had been quiet, friendless, and withdrawn. His only toys had been a whipping-top and a wooden Noah's Ark. On the few occasions when his father allowed him out to ‘disport himself, as he put it, Eyre had walked down the muddy lane to talk to the neighbouring farmer's collie-dog, which stood chained and miserable by the fence. Eyre used to have daydreams about setting the dog free, and running away with it to sea. He had never seen the sea; but old Mr Woolley had been apprenticed to an East Indiaman, and had told Eyre with great earnestness that the sea was ‘like glass, and like moving mountains, and sometimes like hell and damnation all put together'.

Eyre's mother had been a gentle quiet-spoken Derbyshire girl of no particular beauty. But although she had been completely overwhelmed by his father's strictness, she had graced Eyre's childhood with a warmth that had at least made it tolerable. He remembered the softness of his mother's cheek, the soapy-scenty smell of her neck, the sharpness of her starched aprons. One day, when Eyre was twelve, she had walked all the way to Bakewell market
in the rain, and a week later she had died of pneumonia. So white! and not like his mother at all. And after that, life at the vicarage, already strict, had become an endless penance of catechism and parochial duties, to say nothing of the undercooked tripe and slippery onions with which Eyre had regularly been served by his father's housemaid, the turkey-necked Mrs Negus.

When he was twenty, Eyre had been sent by his father to Chesterfield, to study divinity under Dr Croker. But there, two people had changed his life forever. The first had been his landlady's daughter, a flirtatious and friendly young girl called Elaine, who had teased him and winked at him, and at last (the day after his twenty-first birthday) had taken his virginity from him, in his own rumpled bed, all giggles and perspiration, on a stormy afternoon when the thunder had rolled around and around Chesterfield's twisted spire, and the rain had clattered in the gutters outside his bedroom window. Eyre had delighted in her plump white pink-nippled breasts, sugar-mice he had called them; and in her chubby thighs, and the moist blonde hair between her legs; and most of all in the conspiratorial way she had whispered in his ear, her breath like the wind from a church-organ bellows, ‘I'm glad you're a bit of a devil, Eyrey, as well as an angel.' Eyre had thought of his catechism, and of
Pilgrim's Progress
, but then he had smiled less than shyly and kissed her, and decided that God really could be bountiful, after all. And that His gifts could embrace more than fishes, and loaves of wheatmeal bread, and more than divine inspiration, too.

Then there had been John Hardesty, a fellow student, curly and serious; who had given up his theology studies after two terms to go to Australia, to raise sheep. John had been the son of a wealthy Derbyshire sheep farmer, and had been enthused for years with the idea of making his own fortune in a strange land. His father had stood against him, and insisted that at least one member of his family should be given to God, but at last John had decided that he would have to go. He had begged Eyre to emigrate
with him. In South Australia they were all free men, and from what he had heard, they were making thousands. Thousands! And not a word of religion; thank God.

Eyre had been tempted. But whenever he had returned to the vicarage at Baslow, he had been unable to summon up the courage to tell his father that he was leaving. Four years had passed; four years of unhappiness and silent suppers; until the time had come for Eyre to be ordained. It was then that he had simply told his father, ‘I'm leaving for Australia. I'm sorry. I think I'll probably go tomorrow.'

His father had stared at him. ‘You're due to be ordained in three weeks.' ‘Yes,' Eyre had told him. Then, quite gently, ‘Nonetheless, I'm going.'

There had been a moment of unexpressed emotion; a moment which Eyre would remember for the whole of his life. His father had stared at him with such anger that Eyre almost believed that supernatural forks of lightning would flicker from his eyes; and thunder blare out of his mouth. But then he had reached across the table and laid his hand on top of Eyre's hand, and said, ‘I shall pray for you. And I shall ask of you only one thing: that you always remember that I love you.'

In that one moment, Eyre began to understand for the first time the spirit of Christian tolerance; and also to see how lovingly, as well as how severely, his father had brought him up.

He and his father had taken a last walk together on Big Moor, the evening before Eyre was due to leave. The clouds had been dark and soft and a stirring wind had blown through the grass from the south-west. There had been rain in the air, and the moistness of the atmosphere made distant noises sound clearer: the barking of dogs, the jingling of bridles.

Eyre's father had stood a little way off, his face to the wind. ‘Don't go believing what people tell you,' he had said. ‘But never say you can't to anybody. What you want
to be done, through the power of God, can be done. What needs to be done, will be done.'

The next morning, with all of his bags packed, Eyre had held his father very tight. His father had seemed so bony and smelled of Latakia snuff. Patting Eyre's back, his father had said, ‘Don't cry; for we shall never see each other again.'

Eyre had sailed seven weeks later from Portsmouth, bound for Port Adelaide on the merchant-vessel
Asthoroth
. On a drizzling day in early September he had left behind him an England over which Queen Victoria had reigned for only a year; in which Charles Dickens had just launched a periodical called
Master Humphrey's Clock;
in which Gordon of Khartoum was a five-year-old boy living at Woolwich; and from which transportation to Australia for life was still a common punishment for stealing cheese, or sheep, or linen.

As the
Asthoroth
had sailed past Whale Island on a slackish wind, Eyre had seen at close quarters the hulk of the
York
, moored to a dismal row of other hulks. It was on these rotting hulls of old sailing-ships that convicts were held before they could be embarked at Spithead for Australia, and they were a particular Purgatory of their own. Eyre had watched the
York
in awe as the
Asthoroth
had slid silently by: the hulk had no masts or sails now, and her superstructure had been replaced by a crazy collection of wooden cabins, complete with smoking chimneys, ladders, balconies, walkways, and washing-lines. The
stench of ordure and grease as they passed downwind made Eyre's stomach tighten with nausea and dread.

He had heard about the hulks; about the vicious whippings and the diet of rotten food; and how many sick and elderly convicts died in their bunks, still within sight of England.

The
York's
sinister bulk had impressed him deeply. No sound had come from its decks and cabins, no singing; only the steady muffled throb of a drum. He had stood by the
Asthoroth's
after-rail as she bent at last to the breeze beyond Southsea, watching the convicts' tattered washing as it idly flapped on the lines, and the fishy-smelling smoke of their midday meal, as it tumbled away to the east like vanishing hopes. Eyre had thought of the words of Jeremy Bentham's imaginary judge, as he sentenced a thief to transportation, ‘I sentence you, but to what I know not; perhaps to storm and shipwreck; perhaps to infectious disorders; perhaps to famine; perhaps to be massacred by savages; perhaps to be devoured by wild beasts. Away—take your chance; perish or prosper; suffer or enjoy. I rid myself of the sight of you.'

He had turned away at last to find one of the
Asthoroth's
crew watching him, a red-headed Hampshire man with striped pants and earrings, and eyes as sharp as whalebone needles.

‘You hear that drum?' he had remarked, in an oddly challenging voice. ‘They're flogging a man, and that drum marks the time. Fifty lashes, by the count so far.'

‘Well, God have mercy on him,' Eyre had replied.

The red-headed sailor had snorted mucus from his nose, and wiped it on his arm. ‘Don't you go feeling sorry for them wretches,' he had said. ‘You'll have trouble enough looking out for yourself, once we reach Australee.'

‘I was thinking how they're treated as refuse; as men without souls,' Eyre had said.

‘Yes,' the red-headed sailor had agreed. ‘For once sentenced, that's what they be.'

It had taken the
Asthoroth
eight-and-a-half months to
reach Port Adelaide, in the last week of June 1839. During the voyage Eyre had become a stone thinner and his dark hair had become streaked by the sun. He had also become more confident, more sure of himself, although he had still been uncertain what he would do to make his fortune once he reached Australia.

He had rounded the Cape of Good Hope on a spanking bright day, and seen Table Mountain with her grey-and-white crown of clouds. He had crossed the Indian ocean under a sun that was as hot as a blacksmith's hammer. He had eaten fresh pineapples in Colombo, in Ceylon, on a night when the rain thundered down among the leaves; and had his fortune told in Singapore, in the hush of a Buddhist temple, with incense drifting across the courtyards like ghosts. The fortune-teller had warned him, ‘Beware of your own fortitude. Beware of your own faith. Your own determination is your greatest weakness. Beware, too, of the sun; for the sun will be your most implacable enemy, and you will learn to curse it.'

He had seen parakeets and leaping dolphins and the sleek fins of cruising sharks. He had awoken one morning off Tandjung Puting, in Borneo, to find the ocean as still and steamy as a laundry, with no wind, and no sound but the cries of invisible fishermen in the fog. And he had sighted Australia at last,
Australia Felix
, as Major Thomas Mitchell had named it, ‘Happy Australia'; a long low coastline with a cream of surf, and clusters of dark green trees.