The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  Everyone seemed very relieved that I’d renounced literary or other excessive grandeur. I even heard the older Desailly sister whisper to the tall young man at her side, ‘But he seems so normal.’ And yet I knew by their expectant faces they would want some exaltation from me, something my father always and routinely brought to his gatherings of friends, and to strangers too, but something I had no gift for.

  ‘Our other guests are already here and resting,’ said Mrs Desailly. ‘Do you know the Fremmels?’

  The Bonney brothers said of course they did. ‘The men are bolstering our team,’ said Mr Desailly. ‘As are these gentlemen, Messrs Brougham and Malleson.’

  I felt an immediate slump in joy, for the two of them somehow looked very fit as cricketers and suitors of the two charming Desailly girls.

  ‘We try to field a team of white chaps here,’ said Mr Desailly, as if it were an eccentricity of his. ‘A genuine Gentleman’s XI. Quite an achievement so far out in the Australian bush! I don’t have the liking for the darks that the Bonneys do. I treat them generously with rations while he behaves as if they are his brothers.’

  ‘Indeed they are my unspoiled brothers,’ Fred asserted. ‘They may have some challenging habits, but they had theirs before we had ours, so I do not judge. And when it comes to loyalty . . . We could not run Momba without them.’

  ‘Including those old ladies with clumps of white kopi in their hair?’ asked Mr Desailly.

  ‘If you like,’ Fred replied.

  Mrs Desailly let loose her laughter again, and it was the sort of laughter that set others off. ‘Don’t expect me to wear a hat of gypsum should anything befall you, Mr Desailly.’

  ‘I know from this side of the grave that there’s no chance you will,’ said Mr Desailly. ‘Unless you find out it’s good for the complexion.’

  After a while a colonial maid showed me to my room, telling me in a strange accent – ‘Aye kin git yez warta for a barth enytoime yez’d loike it, serr!’ I was grateful after I’d decoded what she’d said, for after the long ride a bath would be welcome. Before using the bathroom I felt I must speak to Willy Suttor, embarrassed as I would be to tell him I knew something of the manuscript. So I went out, still in my riding clothes, to find him. I knew he was staying in the Netallie storekeeper’s house and chose the house most like his own – with a wide earthen veranda under a wood shingle house with a dark nugget of residence at its centre.

  I found Willy drinking black tea with the storekeeper on the veranda and he introduced me to his friend. I expressed the normal delight, then asked could I speak to Willy.

  ‘You can speak here, Plorn,’ he told me.

  ‘The Fremmels are here, and I don’t think we expected that.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Willy, ‘that man Fremmel has everyone on his hook. Even Desailly.’

  The other storekeeper laughed at this observation then declared, ‘You can be sure the very God you invoke, Willy, probably owes money either to him or to Elders.’

  Willy asked could the storekeeper forgive us if he and I stepped out into the evening dusk to discuss the impact of this on our team and we walked a short distance away.

  ‘So you read the mad Maurice manuscript, of course?’ asked Willy leniently.

  Despite sweating with shame at having plunged into Maurice’s tale, I admitted it was so.

  ‘I knew you would. I suppose, on reflection, there’s nothing like motivating a chap to read a document or a book than by telling him not to!’

  I was grateful to him for passing it off so lightly.

  ‘So, you know now he claims to have had some questionable connection with his aunt, Mrs Fremmel? Although that might be the literary imagination in him. I do hope so.’

  I must have looked wan for he shook his head and said, ‘I feel I must speak to him simply to avoid mayhem in that household. He is bound to the uncle for now, but there are plenty of places in Australia a fellow can disappear – Tasmania, for example, or Queensland. My God, he’d probably be able to earn enough to take off to California or New Zealand for that matter, or across to Peru.’

  All this was delivered in such a man-to-man manner that I felt I should make an attempt to answer in kind. ‘I can tell him that I have read what is written,’ I suggested, ‘and that I doubt very much my father and Mr Wills will publish it in All the Year Round.’

  ‘That is good,’ said Willy, doing the honour of thinking me his co-conspirator for the good of marriage in Wilcannia. ‘I’m sure it’s the truth, too. Such morbid stuff! I mean, it’s not as if he tells us anything we don’t know.’

  I didn’t enlighten him of the fact that Maurice’s writing had sent my senses running and for good or ill enlarged my map of the world. But as if I were a consumer not only of All the Year Round but of the Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Journal, Punch and the London, I said, ‘I can’t see any paper that would do Maurice any good publishing this. Many readers would be appalled, I think.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Willy. ‘No one would want boys your age reading this stuff. Yet I have to say Maurice seems to write it in such innocence. I will advise him to destroy it. As I said, the damage . . . doesn’t bear thinking of, not least to Mrs Fremmel. And I believe Fremmel himself is a vengeful bugger, and I would not like to let him loose on his wife, Maurice or any of us.’

  I nodded seriously but then Willy laughed and said, ‘As well as that, Fremmel is a stylish batsman and he’ll be playing for Netallie, of course. There are two reasons for fearing him.’

  So we broke off our conference, Willy to go back to his black tea, me to go and bathe in some delightful hot warta.

  The dining room glittered that evening, a tribute to the British gift for remaking Britain on any margin of the earth. There were a great number of people at the table altogether, including Willy Suttor in his best if slightly worn jacket. I was delighted to find I’d been seated between the two beautiful Desailly daughters with Maurice on the other side of Blanche. He spent a deal of time engaging her, and seemed in genuine conversation and not discussing any Blake-inspired ideas with her. I spoke with the young Constance Desailly and with Malleson, who was an articled clerk in a Wilcannia law practice. Constance had been learning shorthand in Adelaide and told me, ‘You must be aware by now, Mr Dickens, that though living in Netallie makes us nominal citizens of the colony of New South Wales, we are actually closer to Victoria and South Australia.’

  Malleson agreed, saying, ‘Yes, we’ll always be travelling to Melbourne or Adelaide until the government in Sydney constructs a railway to Wilcannia.’

  ‘Could you secede like the American states?’ I asked. ‘It surely should not cause bloodshed here?’

  They both considered this such a sally of wit that they repeated it around the table, and Mr Desailly and both the Bonneys praised me for having reminded them of the excellent concept of peaceful secession.

  ‘Secession would be easy,’ Willy Suttor put in. ‘What would cause bloodshed is whether Fort Bourke or Wilcannia should be our capital!’

  This was applauded, and bloodshed on such a basis was considered blood well spent.

  I looked at Connie, who was laughing. She was wearing a burgundy dress with a black sash, though there was no mourning in her. She seemed such a pleasant, cheerful, sensible, calm girl – and pretty too. Were the machines and organs of desire in her? I wondered. How miraculous that beneath her shorthand and station exterior . . .

  I blushed at my thoughts as her father rose and started to speak.

  ‘I rise at the behest of my wife,’ he began, ‘who seems to believe the present Germanic House of Battenberg the appropriate rulers of Great Britain. I, by contrast, grieve for the defeat of the Stuarts at Culloden.’

  There were theatrical groans around the table and men picked up silverware and chimed it against the Desailly cut-glass as if they were pretending to disapprove of him but wanted him to go on.

  ‘Of the said House of Battenberg there is a prince named Alfred, son of the s
upposed Queen, visiting the Australian colonies now. He has already played cricket in Western Australia where, I am proud to say, his cricket team from HMS Galatea was thrashed by the honest settlers!’

  Boos, cheers, chimes. Looking across at Maurice I saw he was paying attention like a man not obsessed with his uncle’s sins. His aunt, further up the table, seemed bewildered but bravely smiled. I felt a surge of pity for her, though why pity I don’t know.

  ‘So the wastrel Germanic son, trained in profligate habit, will make his way feasting and wenching through the Australian colonies . . .’

  ‘Easy there, Dobbin!’ men cried, and ‘Shame!’, ‘How so a wastrel?’, ‘A Fenian in our midst!’ and ‘Throw the Jacobite in the Tower!’

  ‘All jokes aside, gentlemen,’ Mr Desailly persisted, ‘I offer you, on behalf of my Loyalist wife, a toast to the health of said Prince, the Duke of Edinburgh.’

  Chairs scraped back as gentlemen rose, and then pulled the lady folks’ chairs out so they could join the toast.

  ‘To His Royal Highness Prince Alfred,’ said Mr Desailly, suddenly cured of his love of the displaced House of Stuart. ‘May his journey bring us all closer together . . .’

  ‘And send up wool prices,’ interjected Fred Bonney.

  We all drank and cried out our approval, and went to sit down again but before we could Mr Desailly continued, saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the toast is not yet complete. May I propose a toast with even greater enthusiasm to Charles Dickens, the Grand Master of the age, whose talents are based on the raw gifts of the human imagination and the unquenchable talents of ordinary British people rather than any blood inheritance. We are honoured to have the son of the master here tonight, and so I give you: the great discerner of human hearts, Mr Charles Dickens, and his son who graces our table, Mr Edward Dickens!’

  Shining faces turned to me and glasses were raised, even that of Mr Fremmel, with whose limitations of heartiness and kindness I was now familiar.

  ‘That is all,’ called Mr Desailly to the company, to my great relief.

  After we had sat back down, Constance Desailly said to me with a smile that was tentative but not cloyingly so, ‘I was so pleased when I read that David Copperfield learns shorthand in your father’s novel. It made me feel very important and very clever. Do you have something that makes you feel clever, Mr Dickens?’

  I paused for a moment and said, ‘Horses. I feel I am fairly clever at horses. I certainly have a good mare.’

  ‘That’s a good thing to be clever at in a country like this,’ she replied, further amused.

  She was a most engaging young woman, I thought, but all such cultivation of new bonds was somehow in abeyance, and what weighed on me was that I needed to speak to Maurice.

  ‘And how are you at cricket?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a good scorer,’ I said. ‘I’m actually good at batting averages. It’s the only mathematics I’m interested in.’

  She laughed again. ‘And are you a good batsman?’

  I was tempted to fall back upon my small triumphs for the Higham XI, but I just said, ‘Well, we shall discover that tomorrow, shan’t we?’

  She also found this genuinely amusing.

  I was disappointed when the time came for the women to retire to another room and I watched Connie leave with regret. The men remained, chattering amongst themselves.

  ‘You have a rational relationship with your wife, Desailly!’ I heard Mr Fremmel boom.

  ‘Rational?’ laughed Mr Desailly. ‘Why do you say that, my dear chap?’

  ‘Reason seems to have triumphed over your eccentricities,’ said Fremmel. ‘And if I could say so, you seem equally matched in both. You understand each other’s minds and each other’s – if I can use the term – quirks. Such unions are I think rare.’

  Fremmel seemed to appeal to the room to back up this observation and a few of us, including Willy Suttor and the Bonney brothers, grunted sufficiently to satisfy him.

  ‘And what do you think of the other sensation of the evening, Mr Fremmel?’ asked Willy Suttor.

  ‘Oh, I have already had the honour of meeting young Mr Dickens. I do not think I weigh heavily in his estimation, since he could not see his way clear to accept my invitation that he should address the Wilcannia Athenaeum Society and the public,’ Fremmel replied, turning to me with a penetrating glare that revealed a power to him I had not seen on our first meeting. It was as if he’d promised to deliver me like a live sacrifice to the Athenaeum Society and I had failed to comply with him. I felt everyone in the room had been informed by Mr Fremmel of my rebuff and that I somehow had a debt to appease with him.

  Fred Bonney chose to make a joke of Fremmel’s statement, saying, ‘Young Dickens clearly couldn’t wait to get to the Bonney brothers of Momba and discover the glories of the wool industry.’

  ‘Are you padding up for Netallie tomorrow, Fremmel?’ Willy Suttor asked.

  ‘Yes, both my nephew and I,’ Fremmel replied stiffly before relenting a little and saying, ‘In my case it may prove that the putting on of the pads will take longer than my time occupying the crease.’

  Though to me he’d made this statement because he knew he was amongst good fellows and must appear to be one himself, everyone rushed to say he was being too modest and that he would belt the ball around the paddock and be a thorn in the side of Momba’s team.

  As the men broke up into smaller groups, I approached Maurice and asked him, ‘May I have a word with you, later, Maurice, about your essay or story? Perhaps on the veranda?’

  His eyes lit up. ‘Did you like the style, Dickens?’

  ‘There is no doubt that you are a stylist,’ I told him sincerely.

  ‘But you disliked the premise?’

  ‘Let’s talk later,’ I suggested.

  ‘I would be very grateful to hear your suggestions, Plorn,’ he whispered and I felt a kind of pity for him that he had betrayed himself by giving a record of his innermost thoughts to me since I was hardly a fellow for innermost thoughts.

  Later, we joined the ladies, but because of my preoccupation with what to say to Maurice, I was not at my best with them. At last I went to see if I could find him. Out in the home paddock there were two hearty fires in the night, and the shadows before them, and that magnetic sound of other people’s laughter. As I passed them I saw the drovers were celebrating their own society at one fire, and the Paakantji of our station were mixing with the Paakantji of this one around the other fire.

  I caught a glimpse of Blanche Desailly in the veranda shadows and in the embrace of a young man named Brougham, who had told me earlier in the evening that an uncle of his, Lord Brougham, had known my father, adding, ‘My uncle is a terrible democrat and radical just like your guvnor, Dickens.’

  I admitted that I’d heard my father talking about a friend he called ‘Bruffam’, but that I didn’t think I’d ever met this gentleman at Gad’s Hill. That made him laugh but not in a malicious way – he took my hand and wrung it, celebrating our British connection in this far, far away place.

  The two lovers separated as soon as they saw me. What was one supposed to do, apologise or move on? I pretended not to have seen them and moved on. But I had destroyed their Eden for them and they moved indoors.

  Soon after Maurice approached me saying, ‘Dickens? Plorn? Are you there, Plorn?’

  ‘Here,’ I called from amongst the geraniums.

  He hurried down the steps and came so close to me I could smell the sherry on his breath.

  ‘So you read it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as if I dealt with manuscripts every day.

  I paused, still unclear of how to give him my response, then said, ‘Well, it is indeed a superb form of writing if you take it on itself and on its own terms. But given that you attack both my father, the founder of All the Year Round, and staple contributors to Fraser’s Magazine, and thus Mr Thackeray, I simply wondered on what grounds it would appeal to either of these gentlemen to publish it.�
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  ‘Why, because they may very well be pleased to receive criticism? These are great men and thus, so I surmised, have great hearts,’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘But don’t you see they are as human as any man here tonight? As human as your uncle, say.’

  ‘I cannot believe that they are as squalid as that!’ he hissed.

  ‘They are honest men. But they have their limits. And I don’t know what in your piece is imagination and what isn’t, but I cannot imagine your aunt or uncle would benefit from its publication.’

  ‘I aim to set my fellow Britons free, as William Blake once attempted to do. I am aware of the extent to which people so used to enslavement resist freedom. But it is what my muse compels me to do.’

  I paused, not sure how to reply, then said, ‘Forgive me, Maurice, but I cannot pass this on to my father. Indeed, if I passed everything I was given on to my father, I would not have time for my own life.’

  Maurice appeared profoundly deflated. ‘You’re a decent fellow, Plorn. I do understand your dilemma. But a piece like this would cause a sensation. Surely your father . . .?’

  ‘If he published this . . . it would be like jumping into a pit for no reason.’

  ‘I thought he was of a more courageous quality,’ said Maurice. ‘Such is his air of amplitude and generosity and goodwill. Does he want the writers of Britain to continue to represent love between a man and a woman in unreal and ridiculously staid terms?’

  ‘He is only one writer, Maurice. He can only do what he can do,’ I began, before an uncommonly handy idea struck me. ‘Maybe when he and other authors write in such fervent terms about love, their adult readers know what is being suggested. But at the same time, authors keep their writing poetic so the young are not corrupted.’

  ‘That is old cant, Plorn,’ said Maurice in gentle despair. ‘There is nothing more corrupting than ignorance.’

  ‘Oh, your item is indeed artfully written – I must say you have the talent of narrating,’ I said. ‘And my comments do not mean it could not be published somewhere else.’