“Holy bloody hell,” said Tim.
Hanney had at last covered the jar again, returned it to the basket, said good afternoon without any discernible disappointment, climbed shakily aboard and rode away. Tim knew at once that in sleep his vacant brain would be taken up with the features of the mute, dissected woman.
Still no sign of the Terara downriver. A long, long, long way to the New Entrance which the river had found for itself in the awful flood of eight years past.
Entertaining the orphans in these waiting, intervening hours seemed such a huge ordeal. Back through the store, he turned his eyes from the jars on the higher shelves, the bland faces of peaches and pears. In the dining room he told the girl, “A bit later, we’ll go to Mrs. Sutter’s when I have Pee Dee in his traces.” She looked up briefly and returned her head to the page. Wanting to know what had her engrossed, Tim stepped around the table and looked over her bony shoulder.
It was an engraving marked, View of the Kimberley Goldfields, Cape Colony, Southern Africa.
“You look at that then,” he advised her, and decided he must not seem to be rushing the orphans to their father’s woman friend, particularly not now, at this most threatening time, as the light faded.
From the meat safe on the back verandah he took two pounds of Knauer’s sausages bought fresh a few days before, and in the hot cookhouse re-kindled the fire and began to cook them up with potatoes and sliced onion in a huge frying pan.
When they were fully cooked, he took them inside and dished out a plateful to the girl. She watched him.
“If papa and Hector and I were in a sulky in South Africa,” she asked him, not like a trick question, “would it’ve all fallen over like that?”
Unanswerable questions from Missy and now from the waif!
“Sad thing is,” he told her, “we are where we are.”
He put a hand on her wrist, to still her mind. Then he woke the little boy and took him to the outhouse, waiting in the stillness until he was done. Back at the table, Hector ate fitfully, not speaking at all however of his horrible morning. The girl proved a ferocious eater of her tea. Stick-thin but a real forager.
“Hold hard, Lucy,” he laughed, reloading her plate, refilling her tea cup. Sugar very good for grief. He shovelled four spoonfuls into her cup. She looked up at him without a smile, planting on him his part of the blame for Albert Rochester and his children being here and not in some level place in Africa.
Unlike his industrious diner of a sister, the boy had sat back after devouring half a snag and seemed to be taking pretty judicious thought about his future. Almost for his own comfort, Tim lit a kerosene lamp on the first evening of their fatherlessness.
Crickets had set up madly in the paddock. The evening full of frog-thunder and insect-chirping, and he began to feel orphaned himself.
“Are you tired?” he asked the boy hopefully. But the boy did not answer, and the girl still had her mind on Africa.
The hoot of the river boat Terara was at last heard. No august hoot, like that of the Burrawong. No memory of New South Wales’s long coastline in its bleat. Slower than a cripple, it was bearing Kitty home.
“Do you want to see the Terara come in?” Tim asked the children, and they immediately slipped from their chairs as if they’d been threatened, and stood ready to go. He must have been pretty good at getting orders obeyed, poor Albert Rochester.
Tim got his coat and old brown hat off a peg on the wall, and led the children through the shop and out beneath the awning, across the neck of Belgrave Street whose dust had got a churning from the hawker and his grey, and down Smith Street past the Greek cafe and so to the landing. Missy and the day’s tragedy receded a little. For a while all felt restored to him. A man in an average season. Across the kindly waters he could hear the picnickers, the returning townspeople, all talking at once.
“See!” he told the orphans. “Mrs. Shea and Johnny and Annie are on that ship.”
He saw his lanky six-and-a-half-year-old son Johnny hanging over the gunwales. Just his arms and shoulders and head. Unruly little bugger! And Kitty and sedate little Annie waiting on the edge of the ruck of would-be disembarkers. Kitty with veil up and basket in hand. From this distance, she looked somehow more pregnant than when she had left that morning. Not possible, of course. Just that you did not often see your wife distanced in this way. Separated by elements. You on earth. She on water.
The black flank of Terara touched the great hempen buffers on the wharf, gates opened amidships and the gangplank came down. People streamed down it pretty much in order of social eminence. Dr. Erson with his lush theatrical moustache, his thin wife. Mr. Chance, the natty livestock and property agent, his musical daughter…
Here were men Tim envied not for their better income but for being at home in the world. No sense of being exiled at all. Erson one of them. Reputed to be the best doctor in the Macleay, though some swore by Doctors Gabriel and Casement. Which of them had separated Missy from her body though?
Women and children milling on deck to descend. Couldn’t wait for land after the slow steamer excursion. His wife among them. He felt calmer to watch her, she looked in such control. There should be at least one of those in every family. Someone anchored. Hanney’s woman in the jar would be more apprised of all this next time around. She would play things safe and cosy and join the Macleay Valley Theatrical and Operatic Society.
Some of those descending the gangplank with their mild, dazed picnickers’ smiles halted for a second wondering what Mr. Tim Shea was doing there with children not his own. Mr. Sheridan the solicitor and his wife. Sheridan very much the young statesman and destined for politics, one or other of the two Parliaments which would soon be available, the parliament of Australia-wide or the old parliament of New South Wales.
Then the accountant Mr. Malcolm, a beefy man, very jovial, representing earth, and his lovely dark-haired ivory-skinned wife. Slender and—for a woman—tall, Mrs. Malcolm. White dress, huge pink hat with a rucked-up veil. She was his finest customer, the only one who occasionally used couplets of Tennyson while buying groceries. But not in a flashy way. As naturally as breathing. Poetry the mist from a noble soul.
Once when dropping off an order in the store, a few young men on horseback had ridden wildly by, yahooing and being fools. A look of genuine defeat crossed Winnie Malcolm’s face and one drop of sweat made its way from the direction of her ear down her cheek. Tim had felt a burning pity for her at that second. But she gathered herself and wiped the sweat with a handkerchief.
“We have to remember, Mr. Shea, that the Saxons themselves were once unruly tribes. Australia will one day become something more august.”
Did she hope the same thing about Ernie, who was so fortunate to have such a jewel yet didn’t seem overwhelmed by his luck? She stopped by Tim and her husband waited there too, with his blowsy holiday grin fixed in place and some kind of cheroot carried negligently in the corner of his gob. A customer of T. Shea—General Store, Belgrave Street, Kempsey. He had drunk a lot, judging from his hoppy smell, and he was on his way home to eat and drink more, and then he’d probably want to jump on the divine Mrs. Malcolm. Lucky, lucky bugger! On top of everything, he didn’t know that the very air had been mortgaged to Missy, to naming Missy, to giving her rest. And that would be the rape of spirit by flesh, yet Mrs. Malcolm didn’t seem fearful. Her upper lip formed its delicate bow while the lower kept its place, glossy and static.
Native-born Australians were like that. Never used both lips at once. He was beginning to see it this early in his children, and it was there in the little Rochester girl and helped make her sentences like those of a sleepwalker.