Each evening he would hobble bow-leggedly to my hearth to talk feverishly about his hope for his manuscript, and each day seemed to undermine the bright-eyed confidence with which he had sent it off.
‘I expected them to read it at a gulp,’ he would say, ‘and put it down at last excited and determined to use every means to get an answer to me quickly, lest I take it from them and give it to another publisher.’
‘You cannot yet know they are not doing just that,’ I – his treacherous son – told him. ‘That they are not employing as we speak every most urgent means.’
As the autumn drew on into winter, and my men and I attended to lambing amidst occasional early winter blasts of wind from the southwest, I argued he could not expect anything before late June, if then. He would shake his balding scholar’s head, as if that span of time was beyond tolerating.
Bernard too, reading in her seat by the table – she never held a book one-handedly, but laid it open on a table, and reverently avoided any unnecessary contact with it – became aware that a mania about time was growing in my father, and that no short, formal notice of rejection would satisfy him.
‘Will you take me to Pigrim and his forger?’ I asked her eventually. For I felt that the betrayal was filial, and the son, myself, should attend to it with what was left of honour.
Bernard and I thus found cause to visit the town again as partners in life, an action which had an air of normality about it since we had done it the first time. We entered the premises of the Courier, and Pigrim, a solid, bald man, greeted us pleasantly at the counter. He was very much in character with his paper, which while attracting the advertising of all the community, being yet the only town newspaper, pursued like the Goulburn Herald a democratic, progressive line of a kind which gave people like Bernard, my father and himself an equal claim on the benefits of colonial society as someone like Treloar.
The time I had dared read what it had said about the trial and execution of Long, it had been fair and compassionate. The fact that I had a convict beloved – or ‘paramour’ as some people would no doubt put it – whom I was willing to bring to town seemed to have increased rather than diminished my standing with Pigrim, not that his was a sector of society from which I could receive benefit.
I could receive the benefit of his printing press however, and of his elegant red ink, and I asked if I could speak to him privately. He invited Bernard and myself to his office, which was not properly an office but a mere chest-high wooden enclosure.
I told him the problem frankly. My father waited on word from some business in England. The lack of it was undermining his health, and I was concerned. Could he produce a few good pages with this particular London company’s address on it, and then I would compose a reassuring letter? I had no idea of the look of this company’s stationery, but I was sure anything official-looking would be adequate.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I could certainly do it. I have an inordinate love of such japes. After all, they got me to this country. But my English crimes were based on need, not on criminality, and not, I think I can say, on greed. My father’s tin mine was burned by some Chartists. I forged share certificates to help him raise the money to re-equip it. He himself was innocent of their falsity, as your father will be of this. I know of your father. I have seen him ride through the town with the consumptive woman. One day he called to visit me to discuss similarities between Sean Long the convicted murderer and Socrates. I believe he too was transported, and his view was that for a fallen society, one needed a fallen Socrates – Long.’ Pigrim shook his head. ‘I can see that he might need soothing, and reassurance, even reassurance kindly counterfeited. And I might or might not have provided some services to my fallen but not inglorious brethren. But I am here above all to make my way as an editor.’
‘This conversation will never be referred to again,’ I assured him. ‘I shall not admit it even to my dreams.’
He smiled and said, ‘That is a bold assurance, and I trust it. But Mr Bettany, if you are to send such an encouraging letter to a fellow of your father’s cleverness, you will need a good replica of a postmark on it.’
‘Yes, I shall,’ I confessed. I did not tell him that Bernard, who had sat quietly and let me attend to the business, as if I were my own prime mover and all my instinct of joy and survival did not arise from her, had already told me he could provide postmarks.
He nodded to a man wearing a cap of paper and quietly setting print on a machine in a dim corner. He dropped his voice, ‘That gentleman there, Joseph, is a skilled Londoner and can make postmarks. He is one of the Hebraic tribe, and yet has done postmarks chiefly for the convenience of Australian men and women who hope to marry in the Christian way here, since there is no hope of reunion of spouses. Your father is right in that, Mr Bettany. This is the Hades of the earth, and while in heaven we are not married nor given in marriages, as both St Mark and St Luke’s Gospels say, in Hades we must be. Now my little Cockney can make you a London postmark, and charge very little more than his time.’
I looked at the thin, industrious, beak-nosed features of the compositor. This was indeed a world of mysteries.
‘So,’ said Pigrim, ‘you choose the date for the postmark, Mr Bettany.’
He passed me a calendar and, as I looked at it, he spent his time on galleys of copy for the next Tuesday’s edition.
I chose a date. May 5. Had the manuscript been received in April, and promptly read and after much discussion rejected, the letter would be drafted in early May, and posted about that date.
‘Very well,’ said Pigrim, looking up and approving my choice. ‘Could I please have the London address you would like the letter to come from?’
I handed the address to him, and he sighed and shook his head, no doubt at the words ‘Booksellers and Publishers’. ‘You may pick up your pages whenever you wish. Write your letter at your leisure, since it would not be arriving for some months yet. But – I stress this – burn any residual pages. And one other small thing, do not put a date on the letter that is later than the postmark date you just now chose. Then bring it me in its envelope, with three penny stamps on it, and my friend Joseph will do the postmark.’
I shook his hand. He was a minister of mercy, and I thought how more useful he was to this disordered society of New South Wales than the Reverend Paltinglass with his pallid charity and Dr Alladair, who had promised so much yet in my experience had chiefly proclaimed the death of people I loved.
Bernard and I walked out, me seeming to support her, but the reverse being the truth, and while passing in front of the haberdasher’s and dentist’s, encountered my father emerging from Lattimore’s apothecary shop. He had been to the post office and held a modest sheaf of mail in his hand, which he passed entirely to me. ‘Nothing for me,’ he intoned. ‘Still, nothing for me.’
One of my letters was from Treloar, proposing a bang-tail muster, a muster of all his and my cattle, for the following September. Another had Mother’s handwriting on it, and I did not open it. I packed Treloar’s letter back into its envelope.
‘I was going feverish at Nugan Ganway,’ Father told me. ‘So I rode in on horseback. And here we are in the streets of the same town on the same day, pillars of the community. Shall I buy you both a drink, or shall you buy me? The Royal Hotel is nice, but back behind that copse, beyond the manse, lies Carolan’s shebeen, and the company is good and rowdy there.’
I could think of nothing worse than a shebeen, and I looked at Bernard and saw that she too could think of nothing worse. But I followed him into the teeth of the wind, over the fallen deadwood of the gum trees, blowing up against my ankles beyond the manse. Inside the shebeen’s dark slab timbers, a fire was raging in the hearth. There was a pallid fiddler at the bar, some unsatisfactory ticket-of-leave man. Approaching the counter my father clapped his hands in time to the music. He asked Bernard what she would like and she said tea, and he glimmered and said he doubted they had tea here.
‘Don’t these C
arolan people drink it?’ she asked.
‘Not, I think, at this hour,’ he told her.
‘Then I shall have porter, thank you Mr Bettany.’
As for himself and me, he ordered two drams of the best firewater, and a little dumpy woman with eyes like marbles set in suet poured them for him, and he brought them to us, and said the woman would bring the porter.
I drank my rum quickly, hoping we would leave, but my father matched my pace and signalled for another dram.
‘Whoa!’ my father told me, intending to prevent me slipping away. ‘Your lady has barely touched her porter yet. And as for me, I don’t dislike the profane crowd as much as I pretended in my Van Diemen’s Land days. As I found in my youth, they have a great deal to recommend them. Many of their faults are the faults of innocence and naïve courage and generosity, of a kind into which gentlemen never let themselves be betrayed. God, I think, must love even the brutish frankness of their decent impulses.’
A red-haired, thin man with crazed eyes approached us and asked, ‘Have you seen my Mary?’
My father softly denied that he had.
‘Should you see her,’ said the red-haired man, who reminded me a little of the dead absconder Rowan, ‘you warn her! You understand? Warn her!’
‘And well she should be warned,’ said my father.
‘Well indeed,’ said the man, and went on to ask somebody else the same question. My father put his glass down and I saw his face suddenly wet with tears.
‘Aldread is certainly dying,’ he told us. ‘I spoke of her when I spoke of decent impulses.’ He turned to Bernard. ‘Be indulgent to her,’ he urged.
Bernard looked away, over the head of her undrunk porter. She had been indulgent long before he had been.
‘And I suppose my mother lacks decent impulses?’ I asked him. ‘What of her courage and generosity?’
‘Ah, she has it, but it is all strangled by her terror.’
I thought then that he deserved whatever might happen to him. He had the compassion to find delight in the mixed virtues of felons, but not in his own wife. I relished now my cunning deceit. I wondered what moral story he could make out of my forger, who was engaged with me in deluding him. Would he extend his universal fraternity to Pigrim?
‘I must be back to Nugan Ganway,’ I told him.
‘Let us have one more dram, and I shall put my horse to the tail of your cart and return with you.’
That was what happened, and happily he slept nearly the whole way home, as I hurried my neat team back to the true centre of my earth, Nugan Ganway.
Lambing over, and in secrecy even from Bernard, I composed on the handsome pages run up by Pigrim at two o’clock one morning, the Evans and Pauley letter for which my father had been waiting. Pigrim had manufactured sufficient pages to allow for practice attempts.
May 4th 1844
Dear Mr Bettany,
I must thank you for having shown us your highly original tract, The Death of the Stoic. My editors and I found much in it that was intriguing and provocative. In a perfect world, where readers might not be so readily outraged as they are at this time and in this century, your work might be able to be published. But given the high sense of orthodoxy which marks this era, in which the slightest exuberance of ceremony or church decoration brings cries of outrage from the mass of the members of the Established Church, I cannot see how we can with safety publish your admittedly admirable tract. Perhaps it must await a wiser time, and I hope that in that thought resides your comfort as an author in this rejection.
Yours sincerely
Thos. Pauley, Esq., Publisher
This done, on my next journey to town, I ensured that I travelled alone. At the counter of the Cooma Creek Courier, Mr Pigrim was engaged in discussing some printing contract with the young lawyer named Cantyman, the one who had executed a new will for my father, and who happened to wish to advertise a Queen’s Birthday Gala Ball. I left the office and circuited the block, passing some boys playing cricket in a street of soft ochre clay, before returning with the envelope in my hand.
Pigrim seemed to understand why I was there and invited me inside. In the dark interior of his printing shop, he called the Cockney forger away from his semi-mechanical press, which, due to his pulling of handles and turning of wheels, had been producing dodgers with a massive, thumping-and-swallowing noise. We all entered Pigrim’s little waist-high office, half opened to the shop, where amidst the clutter of copy and proofs, I withdrew the envelope. The starved-looking forger glanced at me.
‘Does sir want to keep the stamp device?’ It came out, very nearly, as ‘dewize’. He held the wooden dye he had cut to reproduce a London postmark. It was inked with red.
‘No. I appreciate the craft, sir. But with your permission I shall put it in the fire.’
The little man stamped my envelope, dropped it to the floor, scuffed it with his hand. ‘You should do this a few more times before delivery, sir.’
I agreed to. So I put the wooden dye, beautiful in itself, into the fire in the bricked inglenook of Pigrim’s office. I watched it consumed, and then took the letter and, too proud to threaten them towards secrecy, gazed as meaningfully as I could at both their faces, which suddenly looked like the faces of fallible men, before picking up my hat and leaving.
I was certain, returning to Nugan Ganway, that my father watched me approach the stockyard and homestead from the doorway of his hut, Long’s old hut, thinking, ‘Mail perhaps?’ For I carried the letter in my saddlebag. I did not visit him however. I rehearsed in my mind how to be blithe and offhand, and how to just manage to remember that the letter, with whose contents I was so dismally familiar, had come.
I went into the homestead, finding its very air warm and tranquil, a gift to me from Bernard. I could hear her talking to Tume in our cookhouse, both their voices brightly raised. I crossed the brief few yards of open soil from the back of the house to join them. As I arrived, Tume stepped out to leave.
‘Your father has been here once already,’ Bernard told me.
‘I have it here,’ I said. ‘I shall take it to him.’
‘Let us pray he’ll be satisfied.’
But as I re-entered the homestead to retrieve the letter artfully placed in a wad of my own mail, as if indiscriminately shuffled in by some postal clerk, my father arrived at the door and began hammering.
‘Madam Aldread could not accompany me,’ he told me when I opened up. He bobbed his parrot head and blinked at me with his bird-like eyes set in a face as willing to hear only the best of news as a child’s might be.
‘I believe there is a letter here for you,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said, forgetting he had been waiting months. ‘Prompt enough. A good sign.’
I said, as if amused, ‘You thought it overdue when I spoke to you last.’
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘there we have the impatience of an old man with a strong sense of the limits on his time.’
I had at least a just sense that I must bear the moment with him. ‘Would you care to open it here, over a glass?’
‘That is gracious, my boy. But I must be back to Madam Aldread. She is really not well today.’ And he made a gesture of the hand and a further bob of the head which indicated his sad doubts about Aldread’s survival. Did he foresee, I wondered, a first-class ocean voyage, a return to England, triumphant for him, therapeutic for Aldread? Did he see her smiling that wild smile of hers beneath a blazing sun, in the Indian Ocean?
I went and fetched the letter from my desk, trying to bear it forth with the casual equability which attaches to a document capable of being a lucky one.
‘Let me know if it’s good news,’ I asked him.
He held the letter up. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, waving it at the air, certain that it was his return ticket to a world he so obviously cherished.
In the instant before he turned to go he seemed to me brave and admirable, an undefeated cock sparrow of a man. My flawed father. I wanted the letter ba
ck to pack it with further regretful prose, to imply that a more orthodox text, if he had one in him, might succeed with Evans and Pauley.
‘You shall know,’ he reassured me over his shoulder, ‘whether your father is a fool or a literary man. Or perhaps both at the one time.’
He threaded his way, as I watched him from the window, an old man with a young man’s step and a fatuous hope, down the slope with the shadow of boulders reaching out for him. In Van Diemen’s Land, where she lived purely out of fidelity to a betraying spouse, my mother walked in uncertainty too. It was for her sake I was engaged in this deception, I assured myself. Or did I still wish to stand well, to appear non-heretical and unsullied to the Finlays and the Batchelors of the earth? I sat down by the hearth and drank the rum I had offered my father.
Bernard appeared with dishes. ‘Is your papa reconciled?’ she asked me softly.
‘I wish I knew. He has taken the letter off unopened.’
I heard nothing that night, though I waited up. But one does not go at two o’clock in the morning, in the bush of New South Wales, to inquire of one’s father what he makes of a letter supposedly from an English publisher. I went to sleep and woke at dawn. Outside, I heard curlews cry and Maggie Tume’s chirruping, as if trying on the new day’s clothes. I looked in the direction of Long’s hut. Distantly, on a knoll, and discernible only if you knew of its presence, was the little molar of Long’s grave, obscured by grass.
But there was no sign from my father’s direction, from the direction of that extreme and whimsical ambition. So Bernard and I ate our breakfast without any visit or message from the old man. I had no urgent duties that day, for O’Dallow managed Nugan Ganway as if it were his own station, not with the wakefulness of the eager, but with a sort of enduring, watchful, relentless energy. I hoped vaguely that the watchfulness did not derive from Long’s example, that to be my overseer could be a perilous thing. So I sat at my desk reading a biography of Pitt the Younger, knowing O’Dallow would call on me if he needed me.
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