The young woman offered to guide him there, and since she had been a child at the time, ten or eleven, they took an older woman with them; but she too, when questioned, was vague and would lead him only by indirections. It was he who felt a kind of certainty and clung to it, as they struck away from the coast and came at last to a bit of scrub by a waterhole. The two women squatted behind a rock. They refused to go further. The older woman began to wail.
There were bones — not so many. Eight parcels of bark, two of child size, resting a little above eye-level.
He looked at one dry bundle, then another — they were not distinguishable — and felt nothing more for one than for any of them. His feelings, which had seemed so clear as they approached the place, failed him now. He sorrowed quietly for all, in the hope that it might also cover his bones, if they were here, and decided, without proof, out of a need to free himself at last of a duty he had undertaken, a promise made, and a weight on his heart, that this was the place and that one of these parcels, which could not be disturbed, contained the bones of a man with a jawbone different from the rest, enlarged joints, the mark of an old break on the left leg, whose wandering at last had come to an end, and this was it. When he told his uncle of the thing (Janet had listened without speaking, without meeting his eye), it was as a dry certainty, though she knew he did not believe it. He was tying up one of the loose ends of his own life, which might otherwise have gone on bleeding for ever.
All that, fifty years ago. An age. They were living in another country. He could afford to admit now that it had not ended. Something Gemmy had touched off in them was what they were still living, both, in their different ways. It would end only when they were ended, and maybe not even then. They would come back, as they had now, from the far points they had moved away to, and stand side by side looking up at the figure outlined there against a streaming sky. Still balanced. For a last moment held still by their gaze, their solemn and fearful attention, at the one clear point, till this last, where they were inextricably joined and would always be.
Later, when he was gone, Janet sat in the fading light at the window of her room — she still thought of herself mostly by her original name, and the more so today, under the influence of her cousin’s visit.
Her room was on the other side of the house from the garden. Her hives were out of sight here but they were not out of mind; her work went on, continuous somewhere in her head, and she was pleased to have in sight this other view, these flatlands that as they approached the bay became mud, and later, when the tide rippled in, would be moonlight.
Out there were the houses her little visitors came from: one-roomed shacks on low stumps, behind tumbledown paling fences or rusty wire; yards straggly with sunflowers and strewn with rubbish, old bed frames, a collapsed buggy with only its shafts visible above a riot of morning glory, lines of colourless washing, and in a weedy pile, old beer and castor-oil bottles, charred stick-ends, broken bricks.
Behind the squares of light out there her children would be sitting down to boiled potatoes or bread and dripping, and in a short time now, would sleep, and silkworms, in the dark of shoeboxes, rustling, feeding, would be spinning the sticky gold out of their mouths, the finest thread, and miniature tables and chairs made of white beeswax from which children — Alice, Kevin, Ian, Isabel, Ben — had chewed the last faint sweetness, and on which they had left, in the moulding, their giant fingerprints, would stand in idea! order in the dark of little partitioned rooms, in houses that had been butter-boxes.
It pleased her to let her mind drift so far, then further — out over the muddy, stinking flats towards the waters of the bay, which were not visible yet, but approaching.
Her mind, even as it entered the ravaged yards, the shacks, the heads of sleeping children who were forbidden for the time being to visit but would come back when all this nonsense was over, the jaws of silkworms softly spinning, was at the same time stilled, dreamily attendant, beyond tinted glass, to the life of the hive, moving closer now to the spirit of it, to the language they were using, those angelic creatures in their world of pure geometry, of circles, half-circles, hexagons, figures-of-eight.
When she glances up again, for she has been dozing, the misty blue out there has become indigo; the first lights have been doused, though the houses themselves do not fade from her mind, or the children who are sleeping in them. The first bright line of moonlight has appeared out on the mudflats, marking the ever moving, ever approaching, ever receding shore. All this a kind of praying. It does not make a house any less vivid out there because she can no longer see its light; or the children any less close because they no longer come to visit; or Willie because she has never known him except for what she has felt in Lachlan, and through him, in herself, the wedge of apple in his mouth; or her mother, long gone, standing out on the hillslope in the dark, the dark of her body solid through the flimsy stuff, the moonlight, of her shift; or her father slumped at the breakfast table, the loose skin of her mother’s hand, like an old glove, on the leathery back of his neck; or in darkness now, on the other side of the house, the single mind of the hive, closed on itself, on its secret, which her own mind approaches and draws back from, the moment of illumination when she will again be filled with it; and Mrs Hutchence who has led her to this; and always, in a stilled moment that has lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall, and Flash slicing the air with his yelps in clear dog-language, and his arms flung out, never to lift him clear; overbalancing now, drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives — love, again love — overbalanced but not yet falling. All these, Lord, all these. Let none be left in the dark or out of mind, on this night, now, in this corner of the world or any other, at this hour, in the middle of this war …
Out beyond the flatlands the line of light pulses and swells. The sea, in sight now, ruffles, accelerates. Quickly now it is rising towards us, it approaches.
As we approach prayer. As we approach knowledge. As we approach one another.
It glows in fullness till the tide is high and the light almost, but not quite, unbearable, as the moon plucks at our world and all the waters of the earth ache towards it, and the light, running in fast now, reaches the edges of the shore, just so far in its order, and all the muddy margin of the bay is alive, and in a line of running fire all the outline of the vast continent appears, in touch now with its other life.
Acknowledgments
THE WORDS GEMMY shouts at the fence in Chapter 1 (the seed of this fiction) were actually spoken at much the same time and place, but in different circumstances, by Gemmy Morril or Morrell, whose Christian name I have also appropriated; otherwise this novel has no origin in fact. E. Gregory wrote a brief account of Morril’s life from which I have taken the three descriptions of local flora at the beginning of Chapter 14. The Herbert letters in Bruce Knox’s Robert Herbert: Premier provided some of the detail for Chapter 18.
My thanks to Joy Lewis, Brett Johnson, Christopher Edwards, who typed the manuscript and, as its first reader, made many valuable suggestions, Professor Alan Sanderson of the University of New England, and my editors at Chatto & Windus, Jonathan Burnham and Carmen Callil.