“What children are these, Tim?”
“They’re the Rochester children, Mrs. Malcolm.”
Here in sight of Kitty and his own children, he kept a curb on his pleasure in Mrs. Malcolm’s normal sentences. And as if to show all was fair and above board, he turned to bovine Mr. Ernie Malcolm. What a bush aristocrat! Yet he stood just behind M. M. Chance as a leader of the community.
“They’re Mr. Albert Rochester’s children,” said Tim. “Poor feller had an accident this morning.”
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Malcolm. She had noble, long features. “Where is he put…?”
“It was a mortal accident, Mrs. Malcolm.”
Mrs. Malcolm looked at the small, level-gazing Rochester girl who stared so judiciously back at her that now she had to fling her eyes to the sky and say, “Poor darlings.”
“Here,” said Mr. Malcolm. He didn’t have any sense that this little kid expected him to help her lift the whole disaster to another continent, and then smooth over any tears in the fabrics of place and of time. He kept the cigarette-ish thing in the bunched corner of his mouth as he threw his head back too and began fumbling in the pockets of his vest. He took out two shillings, and offered one in his left hand and one in his right to each of the Rochester children. He did it too as if this were the spacious limit of his charity.
The children frowned at him. So Malcolm reached down now and opened Hector’s hand and put the shilling in there and closed the fingers for him, and then he did the same with Lucy’s small, grained hand. He was pretty pleased with himself. He was their gift-horse.
“His head was broken,” Tim whispered to Mrs. Malcolm. “An accident on the road.”
“Dear God!” she said in a low voice back. “Let me know if there is anything I can do…”
Was this a token offer? Tim wondered. Tim didn’t like the way, dragging his wife, Mr. Malcolm moved off as soon as Kitty arrived on the wharf. Was she a person beneath his bloody attention?
“Hello there,” cried Kitty. Her long mouth split in the plainest and most personable of smiles. How could a fellow not like women with their kindnesses so varied?
“Good evening to you, Mrs. Malcolm,” she called after the Malcolms, and winked at Tim.
Mrs. Malcolm said over her shoulder almost nervously, “Yes, Mrs. Shea, we met in the store. Didn’t we?”
And Kitty murmured, “We did, and is that the reason you’re disappearing like a rat down a drain now?”
How hard his daughter Annie stared at the Rochester child. Tim nudged her round cheek with a knuckle. “Come on, Duchess. Don’t be grim.”
Kitty said, “She did ask me from the very deck what is papa doing with those children?”
A trace of chastisement in Kitty’s voice. As if she thought he’d wilfully gone out and collected two children.
Tim, inhibited by the listening Rochester children, gave a brief summary of the disaster.
“Their horse dragged their sulky off the edge at O’Riordan’s at Glenrock this morning. Their father Albert Rochester is finished. These infants are on their own now.”
“Then come, come,” said Kitty when he finished. “Let’s feed you all.”
“Done already,” he told her with the small pride of a male who manages to put a meal together.
Johnny performed a cartwheel on the splintery boards of Central landing to show Lucy Rochester it was possible.
Tipsy excursionists, having crossed the wharf, were struggling now up the ramp to Smith Street and getting up on their parked sulkies and carts. Mr. Malcolm, by now having helped his wife into their trap, unhitched his horse and took some heaving to get himself up. He shook out the reins energetically.
“I hope the horse is soberer than he is,” Kitty told Tim. “What’s to do with these waifs would you say, Tim?”
“Careful now,” Tim called to Johnny, who was running into Smith Street and its backing carts and its resentful bucking horses. “Careful there, John.”
For Johnny had a crazy look in his eye, put there by meeting another child and recognising some answering lunacy there. Soulmates, it seemed. And the steamer trip hadn’t taken all the ginger and stampede out of the boy.
As they walked along, Smith Street cleared though the dust of others hung still in the air. Old Tapley, who was believed to have once been a London pickpocket and to have been sent to Port Macquarie for it in those days, puttered out of Belgrave Street with his little ladder and his tapers and began lighting up the lamps in front of the draper’s, on a slant across from T. Shea—General Store.
Kitty said, “You did not have your day of solitude then?”
“No chance.”
He felt restored though for the moment. He had that wonderful feeling of being married, and of heading home to a place marked with his name in blue and yellow. He took Kitty’s basket, and in reaching across her to do it, picked up the malty aroma of stout she gave off. Recommended for Carrying and Nursing Mothers.
When Tim took the basket, letting go of Hector’s hand, Hector immediately walked around and claimed Kitty’s right hand.
“There you are, darling,” she told him.
But it sounded a little brisk and offhand to Tim. She didn’t want to make any promises.
She said, “I’ve been choosing the moment to tell you. I had a letter from the last visit of Burrawong. My young sister Mamie has already arranged to come here and has been accepted by New South Wales. You’d think the bloody Macleay was the centre of the universe, wouldn’t you?”
“Jesus!” said Tim.
“Thought you’d say that.” She’d left the “h” out of words as everyone did in the part of North Cork they came from. He’d tried to put it into his diction, since that lost “h” was something the bigots used to beat you on the head with, or at least to justify derision. Kitty however was never going to try. He’d both admired and regretted her for that.
“I’ve only known myself about Mamie since Thursday,” she said. “The awful little tart didn’t even tell me. Presumed! Presumed we’re always open for emigrants. Since last Thursday is all I knew!”
Which she’d pronounced now and ever would, Tursdy.
“Don’t get cranky, Tim,” she pleaded.
Old Red Kenna, a little rooster of a man, had begotten eleven children along the lines of Kitty. They were a raucous mob. And very earthy. Were they going to come to the Macleay one by one, the arrival of the next one all the more guaranteed by the success of the last? Australia as famous as New York at Red Kenna’s hearth and in that corner of North Cork. The same story had already happened in another direction with Tim’s own more sedate clan. His eldest sister had gone to Brooklyn and married a newspaper editor—married the Brooklyn Advocate, in fact. And so, one by one, two others of his older sisters had crossed the Atlantic on the strength of that founding bit of emigrant luck. One of these follow-the-leader sisters was now a housekeeper to a family of Jewish haberdashers, the other had married a stevedore. He, Tim, had been expected to join his sister in Brooklyn, his important sister, the newspaper editor’s wife. From the age of sixteen he’d always said in public that he would, and yet knew in his water he was lying. In the Cork papers were weekly advertisements saying, Attractive Terms of Emigration to New South Wales.
Of course, no one really understood what distances were involved. You could return from Brooklyn. The emigrant’s return was one of the staple bright hopes of all parties. But who could return from New South Wales?
The thing was the idea of being on his own, away from the maternal manners of sisters. That interested him more than he could properly utter even to himself. And now, what Brooklyn was to the Sheas, his own little store in Belgrave Street was to Red Kenna’s squat, charming children.