by Robert Drewe
It occurred to her that of course Queen Gertrude’s version of Ophelia’s death was not, after all, true.
Maybe he would do the gravediggers as well.
‘It was in water that Kate perished, yes. But, dear friends, let us not forget that it was water, that same silver stream, that with God’s help transported our beloved Peablossom, our gossamer darling, to heaven.’
He gave so much of himself, his words, his presence. It was his day, everyone agreed. They sobbed, they clapped, there were even several choked bravos (this was a theatrical congregation) as he raised his moist eyes to the roof.
Now seemed the time to ask him. As they left the wake she did so. The emotion, the whisky, might bear fruit.
His eyes were bloodshot, but he looked steadily at her.
‘No, no. How could you, above all, think it?’ Then he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m so tired, Little Root. What I dearly need is a massage.’
‘I’m too overwrought,’ she said. ‘This is my second funeral this week.’ The other had been Sir Isaac’s or, as she still thought of him, old Mr Pitman. But at least he had died old and accomplished his ambitions. ‘I want to be still.’
At the wake she turned aside when a couple of catty actresses inevitably hissed pregnancy.
‘You have a budgerigar, I see.’
‘The grass parrot?’ said Will.
‘That is a bloody budgerigar,’ declared C.Y. O’Connor, the Engineer-in-Chief and General Manager of the Government Railways of Western Australia. ‘From my line of country.’
O’Connor was in hearty spirits if still a little hungover. Two days before, at St James Palace, the Prince of Wales (acting for the Queen who was busy with her Jubilee) had invested him with the insignia of Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in recognition of his work in the colony.
‘Everywhere I go in England,’ he said, ‘I see our black swans, budgerigars and cockatoos. Forrest is apt to shower Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all with anything strange and feathery.’
After the investiture Premier Forrest had hosted a dinner at the Savoy. Swans were again the motif, twenty of them carved from ice that melted slowly through the seven long courses into numerous little waterfalls, trickling into a central ice pond filled with live—if sluggish—goldfish. Ice fountains played over ornate fern arrangements among whose dripping fronds two hundred London brokers, jobbers, investors and members of parliament celebrated the gold boom that in the past twelve months alone had launched eighty-one new London-based mining companies in the Western Australian goldfields.
The ice swans, the waterfalls, the tinkling fountains were there to attune this City crowd to a particular challenge. As they all knew, gold had already transformed the former Swan River Colony into the Golden West. The next stage had now been reached. If they wanted vastly increased profits they must tackle the water shortage that was holding back gold production and, indeed, infinite wealth.
After dinner O’Connor had outlined his bold scheme to build the world’s longest pipeline to pump water three hundred and fifty miles from the coast to the goldfields. A special independent commission of British engineers had already examined the feasibility of the scheme and declared it sound. Sir John Forrest was negotiating the first instalment of a London loan to finance its construction.
‘But I’m not here to butter up people with swans,’ O’Connor told Will. ‘I’m here to appraise the best materials and methods and pumping equipment in England and the Continent.’ He turned to his friend Oates. ‘And to employ the most imaginative young engineers to join me on the project.’
Will glanced self-consciously across at the dozing budgerigar, one of his bedsitter’s only two pieces of decoration (the other being a photograph of Angelica in costume for A Poor Girl’s Temptation). In its reverie the bird was attempting, in a disoriented, semi-human whistle, ‘God Save the Queen’. He turned back to O’Connor and Oates, both nursing teacups on their knees. Apart from Angelica, they were the only visitors he’d had here in Bristol, arriving unannounced and obviously well-dined at 11 p.m.
‘I thought we should strike while the iron is hot,’ Oates had announced on the doorstep. ‘Mr O’Connor returns to London in the morning.’
‘Over a section of your railway track. I trust I’ll make it safely,’ O’Connor said, shaking Will’s hand and giving his nightshirt the once-over. ‘I hope you can stand the heat. Up to a hundred and seventy in the sun, a hundred and fifteen in the shade.’
Now this lanky, bearded man was lounging back in his digs, tapping his pipe and talking aqueducts at him loud enough to wake the whole boarding house: ‘You’ll recall that the longest pipelines previously built were Anio Vetus, begun in 272 BC, which carried water forty-three miles from the hills near Tivoli down to the coastal valley of Rome. And the Aqua Marcia at Subiaco took water sixty-two miles to Rome. Not until twenty years ago did modern engineers match those Roman projects with the aqueduct carrying water ninety-six miles from Thirlmere to Manchester.’
‘What about Drake’s leet?’ Will ventured. With its catchment high up in the Dartmoor bogs and its levels winding cunningly for miles across the moors, Francis Drake’s leet, built to carry fresh water to his ships at Plymouth, was a textbook favourite.
‘A sailor’s effort, an aqueduct in name only. Anyway, in all those clever-dick schemes the water flowed downhill, which it prefers to do. I’m going to push water uphill. Fourteen hundred feet above sea level.’
‘You can do that?’
‘For four and sixpence per thousand gallons.’
In his excitement he called the next night at the Royal. The confident anticipation he felt striding through the amiable groups of departing theatre-goers in Beaufort Square fell away when he went backstage. She was in a state, shiny-faced and shivering as if in a fever, clutching a satin robe about her chest and glancing at him distractedly from under two sets of eyebrows.
‘I was dreadful,’ she said. ‘Hideous. I can’t get in the mood for a stupid farce. This is my fourth Charley’s Aunt, and that’s three too many for someone my age.’
He always felt awkward backstage. An overawed and clumsy stage-door johnny. It seemed every soubrette, spear-carrier and scene-shifter shared some secret. There was no everyday shyness and decorum between the genders. Bare limbs and insouciant breasts bobbed by in the dressing room. He never knew where to look. He was romantic enough not to want to spoil the stage illusion of mystery and beauty with coarse reality. He could never get over how different actors were from the people they pretended to be.
Her lips were a crimson M above a U. He reached out and touched her powdery forehead, her strange high eyebrows.
‘Something very interesting has cropped up,’ he said.
She was still shivering. ‘They must give me another dressing room. It’s the height of summer and number eight dressing room is intensely cold, even when the rest of the theatre is warm. Cold to the bone.’
‘Show me.’
She had never been as neutral to him as this.
‘It suddenly got cold at curtain call, then I heard footsteps and the swishing of a silk dress. Later a butterfly flew around the footlights.’
He laughed. ‘So you have a ghost.’
She led him into number eight dressing room and pushed him inside. It was definitely cooler. His skin and scalp prickled, but it was not unbearably cold and he was amused at how easily the power of suggestion worked on his imagination. Nothing mysteriously trod or swished. Discarded costumes lay everywhere, wigs stood haughtily on their stands, jars of creams and powders yawned open: the humdrum theatrical reality that spoiled the illusion. She had him by both arms in her tense grip, and something occurred to him as she urged him through the room like a shield held in front of her.
‘Listen, this is Bath,’ he said. ‘Under us are ancient cities of water, sandstone caverns and springs and drains and rivers lost in time. It’s my business to know about these things.’
He sat her do
wn by a glowing mirror which lit up their pores and highlighted the ginger in his stubble. ‘I could tell you about Carboniferous limestone cave systems and the pressure from the high water table in the Mendip hills. There’s water running two miles deep under us. This is ancient rain forcing up through faults and fissures in the clay. The King’s Spring alone spurts up two hundred and fifty thousand gallons a day.’
She was busily creaming her face to remove the extra eyebrows.
‘All this causes acoustic disturbances and changes of temperature. Believe me, your ghost is subterranean water.’
‘That’s all very well,’ she said. Her face was calmer now, shiny and determined. ‘I see things, too.’
WOMAN KISSING COCKATOO
WHEN HE FIRST came into the Great Victoria Desert, Felix Locke was struck by the absence of noise and the prevalence of death.
The country was riverless of course. So, because streams and rivers provide the sound for mute landscapes—and if you discounted the calls of crows passing harsh messages about territory and death—it was largely a landscape without noise. There had been no undertaker in the goldfields before him. The hazardous nature of existence would soon be made clear: seven bodies waiting under tarpaulins in the hospital tent and another three lying in salt behind Ellers’ store.
The equation was clear enough: no water equalled quick death. Of course water governed every aspect of life. The arid plains and scrubby eucalypt plateaus of the goldfields were made up of rock and isolated hills separated by wide sandplains. Any depression in the earth’s surface existed only to hold pungent salt-marshes, clay flats, brine lakes and snowy deposits which resembled the crumbled marble chips on the graves of the genteel poor.
If any rare rain did fall the lakes quickly drained the surrounding land and soon returned to shimmering salt.
But Locke prided himself on seeing abstracts as well as tangibles. Of course he saw the distant clouds of red dust marking the goldfields, the dust rising into the cobalt sky from the general mining method of dryblowing, which separated the light grains of worthless dirt from the heavier grains of gold. But, on the cracked skin of a salt flat beneath his camel’s feet, mired in the pink mud and preserved by sun and salt, he also saw the iconic outline of a scorpion and the dotted tracery of a dragonfly.
These delicate dead things on their way to becoming fossil records of the desert, he recorded in a notebook. He liked to underline the character of places. He was from New Milford, Connecticut and as well as laying out bodies and burying them he wrote poetry.
To see the country properly he’d come by train from the pale coastal sandplain up into the gravelly ranges and undulating country to York, then, when the railway gave out, by horse and buggy into the yellow sandplain of the plateau to Merredin, where the bush-fly swarms began in force, and finally by Afghan camel train into the red soil of the goldfields. On the track he’d passed a camel carrying a 500-gallon water tank; his own camel easily managed his cases of preservative fluids, his cosmetics and disinfectants, his razors and needles and combs, unguents and shrouds. What he called his ‘corks and chemistries’.
At first he jotted in his notebook: ‘Bold timber alternates with thick scrub. Wildflowers make blurred pools of red and mauve in the grey-green scrublands. Golden bushes blaze on the sandplain.’ He had lyrical nature poems on his mind.
But soon he found the spiky-sour whiff of wildflowers too redolent of tomcat spray. He was sore from the camel. It was becoming monotonous to record all that sand. More sand. More scrub. Dryer trees. Redder ground. The Afghans ate only canned fish and damper until Mahomet Mahomet killed a kangaroo and bled it Muslim-style. Felix thought it tasted like venison. Flies drunk on his sweat swarmed over his back and face. The sky was sharp as sapphires. At night the Southern Cross blazed above and he strolled the camp encouraging the shooting stars to perform with swigs of whisky.
He was still one for first impressions: ‘The thing about camels is their constant spit and mucus. It’s hard to get over the snot in your face or down your sleeve.’ After considering camels’ slopes and angles and tempo: ‘It would be impossible to make love on camelback.’
As for the abstracts, he noted the elliptical way the desert’s surface expressed the fundamentals. Sand, wind, sun. On its crust, living things sketched their lives. Sinuous snake trails, traceries of spinifex bush, windblown grass stems drawing geometry theorems in the sand. And scratchers of unknown origin, their claw marks crisply shaped in the dampness risen overnight to the surface of the sand.
He wrote: ‘Slithering mysteries of the night drawn by the glancing angles of first light.’
When he first saw the scattered clumps of tents and hessian huts and bough-roofed sheds anchored down against the dirty wind with lumps of quartz and volcanic rock, he took it for the camp of some tribe of mad outcasts. Between him and its ragged outline lay a stringy moat of white salt lakes as dazzling as sunstroke.
In the absence of water most of the prospectors were dryblowers. A simple procedure: shovel the gold-bearing dirt into the wind and let the barren dust blow away. The miners were of many nationalities and ages but everyone’s face and clothes was stained red-brown, obliterating individuality. Filth was no indication of lack of wealth or status. Some of these men were already rich, some destitute.
He stood on the salt lakes’ glaring shore. Boiling among the heat mirages, primitive machines cooked water. Wood-stove condensers producing smoky, brackish water from salt. There were ten bodies waiting in the heat for him to process. A charred boy. A legless old dynamite enthusiast.
He was, perversely, almost cheerful.
He thought: It can’t get worse than this.
Two years later Felix Locke, Dr Jean-Pierre Malebranche and Axel Boehm the photographer are taking the evening breeze on deckchairs on the verandah of the Prince of Wales Hotel, eating tinned Canadian salmon on sourdough rolls and drinking whisky and condensed water—the salty bread and fish making the water’s smoky salinity almost unnoticeable—and discussing business.
‘You must agree, once you’ve seen one suicide you’d never consider it yourself,’ Locke says to his friend Malebranche.
Beyond the hotel verandah, lights glimmer into the far distance. Hundreds of campfires burn in the dark, spirit lamps glow from buildings and tents. After the silence and blackness of the bush track, the bright contrast leads a young, well-dressed woman named Inez Gosper to high expectations when her Cobb and Co coach sets her down in the main street.
These presumptions had been teased on her journey by the other passengers, five flirty commercial travellers from Perth with their hampers of samples. One of them, a fortyish pharmaceutical salesman full of dimpling smiles, had given her a packet of Condy’s Crystals and copy of the Miner’s Right announcing the discovery of the richest gold reef yet, the Londonderry. She read:
5000 OUNCES
are already on view in the strongroom.
The escort is bringing in more gold today, including
ONE BOULDER MORE THAN ONE MAN CAN LIFT.
The reef is 4ft. 6in. wide and is one
MASS OF GOLD.
It is pronounced by all the experts
as being considerably richer than Bayley’s Find.
NO ALLUVIAL.
GREAT EXCITEMENT PREVAILS HERE.
Londonderry is undoubtedly
THE FINEST FIND THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.
And the packet of Condy’s Crystals? ‘You can’t go past it for fever relief,’ enthused the beaming salesman.
Fever?
His manner made it clear he thought the women of Australia found him interesting. By the time they had travelled a hundred miles, with three stops for refreshments, the salesman was patting his crotch soothingly and correctingly as if it contained something nervy and precious—perhaps a prize pigeon.
‘The throat must be painted,’ he said, ‘and a solution of Condy’s mixed with quinine and water must be taken twice a day, just before—excuse me—voiding
the bowels.’
‘I’m a nurse,’ she said, crushingly. Fever? She was thinking of gold.
But any expectations of wealth and elegance are soon dashed in the short walk to her hotel. Two blocks is far enough to reveal the dusty rawness of the town, its noisy hotels and grog shops, the billiard halls and brothels, all their swaggering hubbub pouring into the street, clashing and swelling with the blaring brass of a Salvation Army street corner meeting and the reedy rhythmic droning of prayers from the Afghans’ camp.
‘It would depend on the circumstances,’ says Malebranche, licking shreds of salmon from his fingers. ‘And the method.’
Locke says, ‘Did I mention that customer of mine, the young Welshman who fell for Ruby Nattrice, the singing barmaid at the Windsor Castle? She kept rejecting his overtures. While she was out with another fellow he broke into her room, lay on her bed, big toe on the trigger, and shot himself between the eyes with his Winchester.’
‘Yes,’ says Malebranche. ‘Evans. I signed his death certificate.’
‘So Ruby came home and found him. The trouble was young Taffy didn’t look romantic and tragic, he looked plain silly. Split his head in two neat halves. Peeled sideways like a banana, an eye on each side. To tell the truth, it was hard not to laugh.’
‘Suicides are increasing,’ says Malebranche.
‘Well,’ says Locke, pouring the brine from the salmon tin over a lump of bread. ‘I don’t see as many drownings as I did in Connecticut.’
Malebranche smiles. ‘But every other method, yes? The other side of a gold rush—the failure of unreasonably high hopes. They’ll try anything. Shooting, poison, the rope, the razor. Even phosphorous poisoning.’ He recalled the prostitute Edie Brooker who had swallowed a solution of wax matches, dissolving the heads of five boxes of matches in a cup of Ceylon tea.