by Tom Keneally
During the time of these expeditions I was a student at a North London grammar school and lived in Marylebone with my retired uncle, Reverend Eustace Fremmel, and his young second wife, Livinia Fremmel. She was the lively, twenty-year-old daughter of a withered-looking pair, the father also a clergyman. It was in that house that, at about the age of ten, I posited to myself the question: in what sense is Uncle Eustace’s connection to Aunt Livinia like that of uncle and favourite niece? And in what sense is it not? I knew it was not the same because I sometimes saw something like a sneer of judgement on Uncle Eustace’s face when Aunt Livinia said things like there was ‘a storm in the offering’. A fond uncle would find the mistake something he could tease a niece about. Only husbands had that look, I somehow knew. So the connection was something more profoundly personal. A solecism by the wife . . .
‘Solecism’, I learned in the dictionary on the stand in the hallway, was a ‘Noun, a grammatical mistake from the Greek soloikos for speaking incorrectly.’
I resumed reading:
. . . is an infliction on the husband. That was because, I supposed, that as the parson says at weddings, they were one flesh. Thus an error in the wife was accounted an error in the husband.
I knew what he meant for I had seen that same intimate disappointment on my father’s face. It was disappointment at my mother and her sons. Our solecisms! But I had never seen the whole business in the clever terms McArdern used. My father was one flesh with my mother, and so her lack of sharpness contradictorily stung him.
I knew there was a veil I did not care to discern, behind which Uncle Eustace and Livinia, my sometimes playmate, withdrew, and where their true life occurred. It was a life that could never be detailed to me. It was meant to be holy, where they were on their mountain top. But Uncle Eustace’s seaminess and paunch and tobacco-y reek and stained teeth did not seem to be changeable into the truly holy, into the high and the mysterious and the transforming.
Again, I understood. After the separation of the guvnor and Mama I’d felt inexpressibly strange and even repelled by the idea of my father and mother being one flesh and sharing somehow the stew and the sanctity of that.
My father told me about one time when they were returning to me from Italy. The snow in the pass was still so high that their coach proceeded down an alley of road cut between walls of white above the height of the wagon. It was at this time, after late spring falls, that travellers were at greatest peril. It was, however, on their way home in the autumn of my thirteenth year that the calamity struck. For all that summer, while they painted and drank their wine in Ticino, the slab of snow designed to end their lives sat balanced on a ledge above the pass, acquired rubble and boulders cracked off the great crags, and took on as the sun warmed it and night froze it, some of the density and edge of ice.
I knew what was coming. The terrible orphaning of Maurice. And Maurice had the gift to make me feel the imminence of it. I felt that chill of the implacable that others had assured me was one of reading’s joys. And here in this stranger’s work I was finding it true.
When that ledge of ice and snow and slush descended down the valley towards the winding road from the pass, it broke into a number of huge projectiles, and then splintered the coach my parents were in and tore it away down the precipice until at a lower ground its indiscriminate velocity overran farmhouses and devoured cattle as it had devoured my parents. ‘What a mercy!’ friends of both Uncle Eustace and Aunt Livinia told me. ‘That my parents were simultaneously snatched by the thunder of ice, and did not for an instant need to mourn each other.’ The pious were willing to give God the credit for smothering and shattering and bearing away the bodies of my parents in the one instant, to be discovered later and identified only through the fragments of clothing left on them.
My young aunt Livinia was my sole comfort during this time when people said so many silly and kindly things to me. My parents, I was assured by people who barely knew them, would not have chosen to have survived each other. That it was up to me, now, to assume the mantle of their cleverness and become a painter. There were gratifying eulogies to both my parents in the main papers, which Aunt Livinia read to me, emphasising certain words she thought might be of special comfort. On the one hand, she told me practical things – that the lawyer had informed my uncle that the execution of my father’s will would be delayed a little because some claims on the estate had to be logged and verified. ‘But you know,’ she told me, ‘your parents were not wealthy people nor provident by nature or profession’. Yet she had spoken to Uncle Eustace and he was as determined as she was that I should not need to leave my school.
For the sake of reading the obituaries, she pulled me close to her on an ottoman. I felt the whalebone casings that held her tight, and from within them could feel the beat of the generous blood of her heart. I felt as well that she was a woman, and that in a sense she gave me her breasts to lean against in a way which would not have occurred had we not been reading these solemn memorials, had she not been determined to convey them to me and implant each solemn syllable. I felt her as she fervently embraced me and I felt in myself an answering enthusiasm, a disturbance of the blood, and confusion of such marked delight and enthusiasm and abasement that I knew I would seek it again.
Despite exhaustion dragging at me, I continued reading Maurice’s account of his boyish excitement at his young aunt’s embrace, wondering if Aunt Georgie had ever held me so close when I was little, since I was reputed to be a success as an infant, a charmer. And Aunt Georgie was a woman separate unto herself in a way a mother is not, without trailing the brawny tendrils that connect a mother to her children. She had plenty of softness, a dreamy tenderness in her eyes but a housekeeping competence too, that my mother didn’t possess. But she had already turned thirty by the time I was five and was a much more formed woman than this young Aunt Livinia sounded. In any case, discomfort with the question of Aunt Georgie and breasts and female mercy made me back away from it. It was the unseen Livinia who I dreamed of and ached for briefly before sleep took me and Maurice’s manuscript slid to the floor of my room.
When I came down the hall to the dining room in the morning, I heard the voices of the Bonney brothers raised in mid-conversation. As I got closer I overheard Fred mysteriously assert, ‘My dear Edward, I certainly didn’t take him off because I believed him in any moral danger.’
‘Yes, but you’re a cunning one, Fred,’ Edward replied. ‘You take him away sketching. You take him away mustering. You use him on photographic expeditions.’
I’d briefly thought they might be discussing me, but the ‘sketching’ suggested it was Yandi.
‘I don’t criticise your predilection, Edward. But you must be aware the old men are delaying his initiation rite because of your enthusiasm for him. They are not fools.’
‘But as narrow-minded as a British clubman,’ said Edward, more forthright than he normally went to the trouble of being.
Fred Bonney said nothing, so I entered. Both brothers seemed in a mood following their argument, though Edward gazed at me with unaccustomed attention.
Over breakfast, Fred said to me, ‘I want you to take an annual job off my shoulders, Plorn. Cricket.’
I nodded, smiling. ‘Cricket’ was a word of instant magic for me as it was the family game of the Dickens.
‘We play an Easter game of cricket against the men at Netallie Station. On the Saturday before that we’ll have a practice match here, the drovers versus the rest as a guide for the Netallie game. I want you to get this practice match ready, now that you’ve had an experience of the muster. There are cricketers in the midst of many of them. Send a note to any boundary rider you think might have the talent and say they have permission to ride in for the game. And do not neglect the darks. Some of them have a natural aptitude that suggests Adam may have played cricket in Eden.’
I beamed at both men, for I could not have been given any better task, and my days thereafter were filled with the democratic
business of collecting men’s names, letting all candidates know, sometimes by notes sent out by boundary riders, that they were eligible to play in an eighteen-a-side match in the home pasture with the prospect of being selected for the Momba XI.
After Fred told me to check the score cards of past cricket matches in the station ledger, I saw that Momba had been narrowly beaten before Christmas last by the town of Wilcannia, but it had meritoriously beaten Bourke between Christmas and New Year. I also discovered that the game against Netallie was played for something called the Desailly Trophy, which had me wondering if it had anything to do with Mrs Desailly, whom I’d met on the boat to Wilcannia.
I went and saw Willy Suttor, who had taken a trawl of wickets in each of the recorded games. To be able to tell a man of such character and age that in Fred’s eyes he was as good as guaranteed a position in the final team felt like an act of colonial robustness, of male-to-maleness I had never been called on to exercise before. The thought that Australia might make a man of me quelled any speculation I might have had otherwise regarding the conversation I’d overheard between the Bonneys.
After we had discussed cricket a while, Willy lowered his voice and said, ‘I am concerned that you may have begun Maurice’s bit of rubbish before I warned you about it. He is a very strange and unsettled young man, though he will be all right once he leaves that uncle of his.’
I assured Willy dishonestly that I hadn’t read anything of Maurice before his warning or after, nor of course that I looked forward to returning to it.
‘He would make a fool of himself if he submitted such a piece to an English magazine,’ Willy said. ‘I am a little angry at the boy for the idea he seemed to have that you were going to send it to All the Year Round for him. I believe it would put you in an odious position if you did, and an even more odious one if it were published. I doubt Maurice intended these results. But what a strange mixture of innocence and knowledge he is!’
I didn’t want to ask Willy what he meant by this, for I wanted to drop the subject for fear of his discovering I had started reading it, though I did venture, ‘He told me it’s to do with aunts.’
Willy chortled knowingly for a minute but then confided in me, ‘You could say that. I tried to persuade him to go to Sydney or Melbourne and leave Wilcannia and his uncle’s agency. But he feels he is his aunt’s paladin – as if the Darling River were a venue for knights.’
Now, more than ever, I wanted to read more of Maurice McArden’s fascinating paragraphs.
‘We might see the uncle and Maurice at the Netallie cricket,’ Willy continued. ‘But it’s impossible to have a conversation with the uncle. He has no inner life at all.’
Some caution prevented me from asking what kind of inner life Mr Fremmel was lacking, and I changed the subject to a frame for Yandi’s sketch. One I found in Willy’s store turned out to fit it nicely, so I could put the fluid depiction of Yandi’s country on the wall of my room.
I suspected that the blacksmith Larkin, who was so strong in the shoulders, might be a fast bowler or a hearty, agricultural belter of the ball or both. I decided he deserved a personal invitation on Mr Bonney’s behalf to take part in the selection trial game.
After receiving my invitation with gratitude he confided in me, saying, ‘Plorn, my wife is on her way here from Deniliquin. Would you consider gracing our plain but healthy table one night?’
This seemed to me, with everything that had befallen me at Momba, to round out my suspicion that Momba was doing much to invite me to apply myself, to find a compass within myself the guvnor said I lacked. This invitation from Larkin, child of convicts, was delivered to me without reference to my father and in Larkin’s mistaken colonial perception that in calling me Plorn he was acceding to my wishes.
‘Larkin,’ I told him. ‘Thank you, I shall not fail to find a night. I will bring sherry from Mr Suttor’s store.’
‘My wife is a Welsh girl, and travelled to Peru and back on her father’s wool ship,’ said Tom proudly. ‘She’s a woman of wide experience. Dashed if I know what she saw in a rough bushie like me . . .’
But he didn’t seem rough to me; rather, a spacious kind of colonial creature, educated in some hole in the bush by an enthusiastic teacher perhaps, benefiting from that schooling more than I had ever managed to do from mine.
‘I told her,’ Tom continued, ‘that in particular lights this country and its long shallow heaves and its endlessness is like the Pacific Ocean itself. Except a Pacific stopped in place by God. As in a picture.’
I gave the following day over completely to cricket and cricket speculation, making a table of batting and bowling averages of regular players in past confrontations with other stations as well as the towns of Bourke, Louth and Wilcannia. I knew I must play well enough in the trial game to validate my own selection, and thus make my Australian cricketing baptism.
I discovered that amongst the wicket-takers in past games was the old soldier, Dandy’s hut-mate, Staples. He was a spin bowler who took a steady three or four wickets per game, even with his wound thrown in. I would need to ask Mr Bonney if a message could be sent to Soldier, or if, being a stalwart, he already had the date fixed in his mind.
When I arrived at dinner that night, Edward seemed to have drunk plenty of brandy, and to be flushed with it. Fred was easy to chat to concerning my researches, but Edward seemed downright sullen and left the table before I did.
When at last I found my way along the corridor towards my room, Edward suddenly emerged from his office. Indeed, it was once more clear that Frederic Bonney was the broad-ranging brother and the visible manager, and that Edward was the man of the office, of the order book and the ledgers. But he now stood in front of me as if he meant to do me an injury.
When I stopped perhaps flinching, he took me roughly – his hands around my ears – and kissed me inexactly on the mouth with great heat and pressure.
Stunned, I broke away from him and stepped back. I must have looked frightened and aghast because he raised his hands to his skull, like a man in a play who fears madness.
‘Oh Christ, Dickens! You are not of that disposition. No, of course you are not,’ he muttered, then began weeping.
‘I am losing the boy I love. Indeed, I never had him in the first place,’ he continued. ‘My brother tells me that. Oh God, it makes me demented. If I could I would flee with him. Perhaps to a kinder place. America, the West Indies . . .?’
I presumed he was talking about Yandi and felt sick at him.
‘Please tell me you forgive me?’ he pleaded. ‘You wouldn’t tell your father?’
‘Not if it’s the once,’ I replied.
‘I wish I could annul the last thirty seconds,’ he muttered.
‘Mr Bonney,’ I began, losing all outrage in my pity for him. It seemed indecent somehow that he had to humble himself before me like this. ‘There is only you and me. Who says we can’t forget the last minute or so?’
He looked at me with a long doleful gaze and asked sorrowfully, ‘Would you do that, Dickens?’
‘I can forgive it all, Mr Bonney. As long as further misuse is not on the cards.’
He assured me of this. ‘Plorn,’ he told me, ‘dear boy. You really are a splinter off the noble block – by which I mean your father.’
‘He warned me of the chance of this sort of attack,’ I said.
‘Oh, dear Lord,’ said Edward, ‘I would be abashed if he heard of my crassness.’
‘He will not, he will not,’ I insisted. ‘Please, Mr Bonney, let me go.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, dear boy,’ he said, flattening himself against the wall to let me pass.
My face was burning again now. ‘When I see you in the morning,’ I murmured, ‘I want you to be the boss again.’
I walked on then, not looking back at him.
10
Returned to my room I sat at my desk and, almost for comfort, and certainly to disperse the pungency of Edward Bonney’s appetite for men, I sought Mau
rice McArden’s manuscript.
At regular intervals, I would ask Aunt Livinia to read me the obituaries yet again, but always when Uncle Eustace was away. I felt a soft, warm excitement as I listened to the solemn words tolling like a bell over my parents’ intact love and shattered bodies. ‘Britain has lost a splendid landscapist and future member of the Academy . . . Her eye for the sea enabled us to see that universal medium of the globe in a fresh, feminine light . . . Amongst his esteemed subjects were Lord Melbourne and Lady Ermenegilda Yeats . . . Amongst her more popular portraits one must number her depiction of Bishop Grice and her rendering of Charlie Brinstead the jockey . . . But her expansive canvasses of the Essex marshes, first exhibited at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists, enchanted as many visitors as did her paintings of the Alps exhibited at the Dudley . . .’ I heard the august language not as a construction of polite grammar but as a warm pulse in my blood, which went with the feeling that derived from leaning on my young aunt’s stomach or thighs or breasts. I was delighted to believe that the obituaries served some purpose of warmth and broad consolation to her as well. She needed a form of consolation, I believed, because her warm blood was called upon somehow by my uncle to console his old, cold blood.
During a dull Thursday morning in autumn, when Uncle Eustace was supposedly attending a meeting of the Biblical Translation Committee in Lambeth, I was at home in Marylebone with Aunt Livinia reading pleasantly along in the rhythms of a eulogy, when the door to her day room swung open. Uncle Eustace’s man, Guilfoyle, appeared in the doorway, but he stepped back instantly to reveal Uncle Eustace himself. Wearing a stricken, piteously extended mouth and an equally piteous gaze, his face was a terrible thing to behold. I have not used the wrong adjective. It was as if what he beheld put him in danger of fainting. He was not an angry god this time. He was a god easily hurt and thus in many ways harder to dismiss. In trying to stand to reassure this suffering and bewildered man, I slid not to my feet but on my back on the mat beneath the ottoman where Aunt Livinia and I had been reading the obituaries. Guilfoyle had none of the delicacy of Uncle Eustace’s appearance. He came clumping across the floor, bent over and grabbed my jacket lapels with two hands and raised me to my feet.