Kitty said, “You can’t beat Mamie. Went all the way to the Agent-General in the Strand to get a special rate. Imagine!”
“And we’ll put Mamie on the verandah like Molly?” asked Tim.
“Out there under a mosquito net while the summer lasts. She should be settled in somewhere by winter. She makes her way, that one. Not at all shy like me!”
“No room in the inn then for some small people,” murmured Tim.
Annie was working herself in between the two of them from behind, saying, “Mama, mama.”
“You’d think those Rochester children had friends and relatives, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, we surely bloody well do,” said Tim.
She dug him with her elbow. “Don’t get sullen there, Tim.”
He flinched. “I saw Hanney’s woman too.”
“Holy God, the little woman they murdered. Did you? Could you see her features and everything else?”
“You could.”
“Anyone we know, would you say?”
“No one. No one.”
“Mama, mama,” yelled Annie.
“She’s such a jealous little creature,” said Kitty.
Jealous little creature. Missy the true jealous little creature. Resenting his idle hours, hanging on his shoulders, pending on all events. Wanting her name back.
“Let me alone,” he muttered.
“What did you say?” asked Kitty. But idly. She did not demand an answer.
Two
BEFORE YOU WENT to the trouble of putting a collar on Pee Dee and harnessing him up, it was best to check the Argus to see if any circuses or any large herds of cattle were due to come down Belgrave Street. He didn’t even like the teams of bullocks which brought the big cedars down to the timber mill. He would back in the traces, pigroot, buck.
There were no circuses on the morning after the holiday, however. No reason to delay taking the Rochester children up to Mrs. Sutter’s house by the showground.
The Macleay so flood-prone that everyone thought of the Showground Hill primarily as “above flood level.” Tim’s place was not. In still hours when he woke, he asked himself about the wisdom of living as close to the spirited Macleay River as he did. Flood eight years past had drowned Belgrave Street to the awnings and filled the stores with mud. Tight as a bloody nougat. He knew because he’d helped old Carlton shovel mud out of what was now his place. In those days, he’d not been a shopkeeper but—after working three years for Kiley’s haulage—had hopes of the Jerseyville pub. He’d shovelled up the mud and heard Carlton complain. Tim in the last of his four years of bachelorhood in New South Wales. He wanted the license to the Jerseyville pub, but the pub didn’t eventuate—Kitty could not reach New South Wales to marry him in time. Just the same, looking to get into business, and flood was a good season to begin, to trade on Carlton’s weariness, to write to the wholesalers in Sydney, sending along your references.
That flood had been a flood out of a prophecy. A chastisement unlikely to recur. So forceful that the river found a new way into the sea near Trial Bay. The New Entrance. Such had been the vigour of the Macleay. It had negotiated a new arrangement, dictating terms of its own with the Pacific Ocean. Kitty, arriving later, didn’t understand how bloody strenuous the huge event had been. “Flood, flood,” she’d complained. “All you hear on every side is flood.”
For she hadn’t seen the way young Wooderson and he rowed out from their moorage, which happened to be the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel, to rescue the Kerridges from the roof of their house in Elbow Street. The current terrible to push against, and on the way back with Kerridge and his wife and two children, they’d seen a chest of drawers sail past. Wooderson, being such a good swimmer, had actually got into the flood and attached a rope to it, and the flow of water had swept it and the boat and them back to the Commercial.
In case the Book of Floods Part Two struck Kempsey, he had acquired a rowboat, in which he sometimes took the children out on the river. When not so used, it was kept tethered on a long lead, like a goat, in the yard. A prayer against further floods. A child, he knew, was a wafer before the force of the water. And Lucy, the wafer of a child beside him, had been through that, would have been an infant in Glenrock, would have been taken onto the iron roof by her mother and father to wait things out. The range of perils which surrounded young flesh. This was what astounded Tim more than he could ever express.
He hoped she still wasn’t pushing Africa round in her head: the possible locale where Albert Rochester might have been safe.
“Do you like Mrs. Sutter’s place?” he asked.
As ever, she answered in the way she chose. “Mrs. Sutter was mama’s and papa’s best friend of all.”
For relief from the features of Hanney’s Missy, he’d happily clung to Kitty last night, but it had been so hot she did not welcome that. For some hours before going to bed, he had known that once he put his head on the pillow and turned the wick down on the storm lantern, he would feel lost in a particular way. And it had happened. He had felt too nakedly what he was: the lost man on the furtherest river bank of the remotest province. But terrible to apprehend it, awful to feel wadded away under distance. A sort of—what was it?—twelve or thirteen thousand mile high column of distance under which he had managed to pin himself.
Now poor Rochester could nearly be safely thought of in the dark. In this sense: Rochester lived, Rochester perished in a fall from his sulky and while insensible was attacked by beasts. It was different with the girl who’d been cut about by someone who could smile. She was dreadfully everywhere, a face begging its name back.
Predictable dreams of her followed, of course, and their pungency remained by daylight and flavoured the act of getting rid of Lucy.
On the tranquil hill, Mrs. Sutter the widow had two gates, one canopied, and another one at the side marked TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. Her late husband himself probably put it there. So much nonsense under the gumtrees. A gate for the afternoon tea gentry to enter, and a gate for others to deliver wood and ice and groceries.
You’d think by that label on the gate that beyond Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow lay hundreds of villagers, dozens of tenant-farmers. And in Kempsey the main gate and tradesmen’s gate lay within a short spit of each other. He was buggered if he was going to take Mrs. Sutter’s suitor’s orphans in by the side gate.
Palm off Lucy and Hector to make a place for Kitty’s sister. Kitty would have had to have nominated her. A form would have come from the New South Wales Department of Immigration, and she would have needed to sign it. But it had taken the sudden arrival of orphans to make her mention it. Jesus, the slyness!
And at the moment he seemed to get, from the direction of Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow, a whiff of slyness too. Widowed once, she had now been widowed in a certain sense again. She’d had none of the joy of drinking tea with, none of the secure married talk with poor Rochester. But now she would be offered his children.
He heard the noise of her children inside now, and holding the little boy’s hand, he knocked on the yellow front door with its panels of pebbled glass. No one came for some time, and then a boy of about eleven opened the door, grabbed the Rochester children in by the hand and told Tim, “Mama’s round the back.” The door was closed in his face. Tim went around the flank of the yellow house. You could smell the hot, moist odour of the spaces under the house. The Sutter residence had the honour of standing on brick piers. The idea of air circulating beneath the floor had seemed an odd one to him when he first arrived. On top of the moist earth smell there was a tang of sweet corruption from the garbage tip of the yard, but between him and that rankness lay the smell and then the sight of soap-cleansed sheets blowing on a breeze.