The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  ‘What a waste,’ says Malebranche into his whisky. ‘And it didn’t even rain.’

  Below them the noise from the public bars is spilling out into the street and booming in the hot electric air. A few cheers and catcalls ring out. Some searchers for the inland sea are dragging their whaleboat through the town. Two swaying and bedraggled English explorers, their Aboriginal guide and two Afghan cameleers shamble north, their camels’ feet rising and falling in the dust with a steady and infinite resentment.

  On the balcony they drink in silence for a moment. Eventually, Locke, nodding in the direction of the street and the slowly departing explorers, raises an eyebrow and says, inquiringly, ‘Axel?’

  The photographer is curled tightly over his whisky glass. The collar of his cream jacket is turned up. He seems to be crouched inside it.

  ‘I can’t be bothered with them,’ he says.

  When she came to the studio that night Wagner rushed to meet her halfway down the street. She let herself in. The studio was awash in opera. Tristan and Isolde. Romantic intensity on a dramatic scale.

  Axel was lying on the sofa drinking schnapps with his clothes disarranged. His eyes sunken and his hair falling dry and floppy on his face.

  ‘It is you,’ he said. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘It is.’

  He struggled to sit up, claw at his hair, arrange his clothes.

  ‘You look pale, my goodness,’ he said, rising to his feet, supporting himself on a familiar sculpted head. ‘Your busy life.’

  Inez stood staring at him. The strange unbuckled disarray of the trousers.

  Misunderstanding her, his gaze fell on the white stone face under his hand.

  ‘Oh, a young, unknown woman, hardly more than a girl, was pulled out of the Seine,’ he announced. He coughed. He gave the sculpture a jerky caress. His accent was more pronounced, and high in his throat. ‘A suicide, most likely. She was taken off to the Paris morgue. She soon began to attract attention there. Do you know why? She was remarkable.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why wasn’t she simply cast aside like every other woman there? What was so remarkable about this drowned and nameless young woman that a death mask was taken from her?’

  She sighed and sat down beside him.

  ‘Tell me.’

  At first she treated Axel in his studio. It was cool and quiet. She nursed him as well as she could. After all, hadn’t she tended hundreds of typhoids, worked the Nightwatch of Delirium for three years? For as long as she was able she did what she could for him. When in moments of pale and furious lucidity he investigated private flesh and perceived that bathing and a change of clothing had occurred during unconsciousness, he would lie back staring for hours at the thin cloud strings moving across the skylight.

  Early on she had to put the inevitable question to him. ‘Hospital?’

  Knowing what his reaction would be. It would be the end of the life he had created. All his nightmares come true. Even with her he reacted as if his privacy was being assaulted.

  He hardly deigned to shake his head. He wouldn’t look at her. Something was missing from his eyes, but there was still fury there.

  Only when he was delirious did the anger disappear. Then he spoke with clarity and in rudimentary prep-school English. ‘Oh, may I go ballooning?’ he asked sweetly.

  ‘Yes, Axel.’

  ‘I am a student from the Atelier Jung in Trier. Do you know my Young Thespians Costumed for a Harvest Performance?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘These are my travelling years. I can see prisoners chained to trees. I dearly wish to see the landscape from the air.’

  When his condition reached a dangerous level she knew she had to admit him to hospital. She had no choice. She foresaw what would happen, but she was addled with fatigue and anxiety. For a moment she was hopeful that if she alone looked after him there she might be able to postpone the inevitable. But she would need to rest sometime. They were nurses—he would be found out in minutes. In her deep tiredness she envisaged the embarrassing flurry in the male typhoid ward. Snorts. Laughter. The terrible indignity must not happen.

  As it turned out, Matron Shand took the revelation of the long masquerade of this prominent townsperson surprisingly calmly. After all, she had an epidemic and a gold rush to deal with. In these two competing fevers she had discovered many permutations of the human form and spirit.

  Quite conscious but totally silent, his eyes closed firmly against himself and the stinging glare of the outside world, against its busy fingers and curious eyes, Axel Boehm was quietly admitted to the female ward.

  The friends of Axel Boehm walked next door to the Prince of Wales. They slumped into chairs on the balcony. No one spoke. Inez looked exhausted. Her eyes searched about her and her hands were trembling. Locke poured her a gin and set the glass down beside her.

  Dr Malebranche patted her hands. She looked forlorn and self-conscious and her question was faint and weary.

  ‘You’ve always guessed the secret?’

  They shrugged. Both Axel’s old drinking friends.

  ‘Of course,’ Malebranche said gently.

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Locke.

  ‘Felix and I both deal with the human body,’ the doctor reminded her.

  Their question for her hung in the air: When did you know? It was evident in their eyes, but they didn’t voice it. Locke ached to reach out to Inez then, to soothe her with his bumbling male hands, but now more than ever he didn’t dare. All he could do was say various things to her, keep the chatter going and remember how she looked.

  ‘Everyone here is from elsewhere,’ he said.

  Concentrated by dehydration, he no longer looks out of place in the female ward. Like all the typhoids he is neutered and made smaller by the helplessness of illness. No more arrogant spunky bearing. The ginger sheen and stiffness has gone from his hair. Fever sweats have long since eliminated the last whiff of pomade.

  The levelling has taken place much faster than expected.

  When his dry voice calls her to him it’s a quarter to six and the first glint of dawn is showing at the edge of the canvas curtains. In the yard, magpies burble at the sun. She hears a couple of birds land heavily on the tin roof of the kitchen and their feet bump and skitter down the slope.

  ‘Open the curtains,’ whispers th photographer Axel Boehm to the nurse Inez Gosper in his last minutes.

  She does so. Then he motions her closer to the bed. Dust motes dance towards his beckoning arm. He is trying to say and do something, and to word it properly.

  ‘The light, the light,’ he says with as much good-natured emphasis and ironic humour as he can muster.

  He’s smiling at her as he indicates the sunray falling across the bed. His timing and position are commendable. It’s the perfect manly, sporting gesture.

  Taking the ray in his palms, he offers it to her as his gift.

  Cajoled and controlled by eight pumping stations along its route, pumped at differing pressures and speeds, the water left the Mundaring reservoir and coursed steadily uphill along the raw orange scar in the eucalypt forests and banksia scrubland and across the gravelly dips and valleys, crossing creeks and skirting hills, and over the still-rising plateau of the interior.

  The seven gangs of men working under William Dance, believing they were keeping just ahead of the advancing stream—swearing they could hear the headwaters surging behind them—laid three-quarters of a mile, then one mile, then one and a half miles of water main a day.

  Working, eating and sleeping alongside his work gangs in the gravel beside the pipetrack, Will understood why men coming in from the desert of an evening unselfconsciously hugged the pipeline and pressed their faces against the steel. Listened to its soughs and sighs. He could easily picture the invisible water. It had colour, movement, sound, personality. By now he secretly thought of it as his own: his inheritance from O’Connor. He visualised the water in grey and foaming waves roaring and swelling alo
ng the gullet of the aqueduct, billowing through the tunnel, individual slabs of rushing form and power.

  It took this water he felt belonged to him eight months to travel on its journey from the reservoir in the coastal ranges to the western edge of the goldfields.

  The pipeline itself was also flowing smoothly on its journey, snaking further and faster into the desert. (Like formerly quarrelling relatives chastened by a death in the family, the parliament and press, embarrassed, had ceased their snapping and offered the scheme their subdued support.) The reason for the burst of progress in the eight months since the Chief’s death was that Will’s machine-caulkers had finally hit their stride. Using James Couston’s revolutionary caulking machine to join together Mephan Ferguson’s radical locking-bar pipes, the work gangs became increasingly proficient the closer they came to their destination.

  Despite the early summer heat scorching the pipetrack, the aqueduct took only another four weeks to travel the last thirty miles to the centre of the goldfields. The water wasn’t far behind. Will and the Department of Public Works checked the flow at the number eight pumping station.

  It was arranged for the water to reach its destination in another twenty-five days. Six days—to be on the safe side—before the official opening ceremony.

  The hands were long-fingered, pale and capable, with prominent veins. The nails clipped efficiently short. Felix Locke took a lot of time with the hands.

  In the goldfields he had prepared many acquaintances for burial. This was the first friend. Once was. Used to be.

  The preparations had gone briskly and professionally. Axel’s body lay outstretched in the embalming room under a strong light. He had settled the features and washed the hands.

  He’d been priding himself on his clinical detachment. The embalming took him two hours. Then the dressing. He took a professional pleasure in the natural fall of Axel’s cream tussore silk lapels and the smooth-fronted waistcoat. The jaunty ginger wave in the pomaded hair.

  His last gesture. He folded the hands together across the umbilicus, in a position of peaceful repose. An attitude of final ease. Right hand loosely clasped over the left.

  The hands were important. He stepped back and studied them. No.

  He placed the left hand over the right instead. And stood back.

  He tried the other way again.

  Time was getting on, well into the dangerous heat of midday, but still Felix Locke couldn’t make up his mind.

  He tried the left hand over the right once more.

  When, after ten months out on the pipetrack, Will returned to the Prince of Wales, to his old room with its balcony overlooking the street and the hospital of the Sisters of the People, he found preparations for the celebration of the arrival of water almost complete, and the town in a high state of excitement and expectation.

  In the January heat small children were rehearsing dancing around a maypole. Knees pumping high, sprinters and cyclists, horses and camels, in training for various celebratory race meetings, plunged and heaved around the town. Bright new electric trams clanged and clattered up the main street. Carpenters and painters were putting the finishing touches to the new theatre and to the new grandstand at the sports-ground. Lacking only its central ingredient to attract custom, the new swimming baths yawned glistening and enticing, a green-tiled, rectangular hole in the ground.

  Still the townspeople found it hard to believe that fresh water was already flowing uphill over the ranges and across the plains and into the desert, and would soon reach the town.

  He carried his bag upstairs and swung it onto the bed. The bedsprings were new and tight. The room smelled of paint, but it only barely overlaid the remembered aromas of stale tobacco and smouldering sandalwood. On the freshly calcimined walls hung framed sepia photographs of goldfields’ scenes, stamped THE AXEL BOEHM STUDIO.

  She’d often mentioned the photographer, ‘Axel’, but hadn’t answered the question: ‘Are you spoken for?’ Whereas he spoke of no one at all but couldn’t stop himself from answering.

  The disappointment in her eyes. The urgency and heightened emotion his answer gave her actions.

  Her orange segments like smiles on a saucer.

  As he unpacked he glanced across at the hospital. The familiar view. His mind and body were recalling the way Inez had last entered the room. Without speaking, taking his face in her hands. Pressing almost violently against him.

  The familiar voice booming up from the lobby.

  This must be the delirium returned. In a daze he found himself out on the landing, and there they were below—how strange yet how inevitable—already heading up the stairs.

  In this dream he gripped a bannister while their voices preceded them. Their particularly dulcet tones. Ham and Angelica projecting across the greatest possible space.

  A middle-aged, hot and pink-faced woman, a maid of some sort, trailed behind them. Before he backed quickly into his room, the pulse in his throat almost choking him, there came another sound not familiar. What fever went this far? The older woman was carrying and endeavouring to soothe a wriggling child.

  Only someone living out on the gravel of the pipetrack could have missed the news. The posters were all over town. As a highlight of the celebrations for the arrival of water, Hammond and Angelica Lloyd—father and daughter on stage together!—would be appearing in a new play, Daughter of Midas, specially written for the opening of His Majesty’s, the goldfields’ first theatre. A season in Perth, followed by a tour of the eastern capitals, would follow. Marcus Doyle had every hope of repeating the triumphant tour of The Princess of the Golden West three years before.

  As the newspaper columns said, now the goldfields were truly featuring on the world stage. What a coup, the West End coming to the heart of the Golden West!

  The hotel room door. The strange sense of history repeating itself. He caught a rising whiff of floor wax and old lunchtime gravies. Dust specks danced in the warm beery sunlight of the landing. He stood there breathing deeply. Their crisp voices murmured and declaimed behind the door. Above their words the burbling nonsense of a child.

  This time he knocked.

  The drama of a hotel room. All the intense emotions it aroused. Intrusion. Escape. Pleasure. Violence.

  It was she who opened the door and stood there no more than the length of an embrace from him. He could have stroked her actressy silk robe, its pattern like a stage magician’s cloak, all wine-dark stars and blue-black crescent moons shimmering around her body. Her hair was long once more, and pinned up. Beginning at her collarbone, an inverted triangle of skin pointed to her breasts. Her bare feet planted on the floor, crimson toenails on the jarrah boards.

  For three years he had fantasised they would embrace at such a meeting. Or that cruel things could happen. But neither of them moved or spoke. Behind her, the room stretched empty to the balcony and beyond to the low gun-metal clouds.

  ‘Will,’ she said finally.

  ‘I didn’t dream it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have a child.’

  ‘She’s bathing now. My happy puppet.’

  She went no further. But she showed little surprise to see him standing there. ‘I wondered when this would happen.’

  ‘You expected it?’ Of course his brain was spinning at her presence, at the idea of the child. He couldn’t bring himself to ask the real question. At the same time he felt vaguely offended at not causing more of an upset. ‘I only arrived here this afternoon myself.’

  ‘You can’t know someone so well and not anticipate things,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose that’s the advantage of a past life.’

  ‘This life has been hectic enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Although I’ve been here two minutes and not been shot yet.’

  She took his hand then, briskly turned it over in her own, frowned at the scar and patted it like an aunt.

  ‘You still could be.’ Ham said, strolling into the room with the little gi
rl in his arms. He, too, wore a silk robe. The child was naked. Her hair was wavy and gold. Her white arms and legs were straining back to the doorway from which they had come, and on her angelic face was the widest, most affectionate smile.

  Will could say nothing.

  ‘You’ve come at bathtime,’ Ham said loudly. ‘You must excuse us.’ His colour was higher, his face oddly rough and peeling; only his pallid bare feet and hairless legs avoided that violent puce sheen. He carried the child from the room again, smiling like a magistrate. ‘I must say, dear boy, everywhere one goes these days one hears your praises sung.’

  He pulled up a chair and sat without being asked. She was still standing, but he was feeling too shaky. The feeling of delirium, then the trembling—this was like typhoid in reverse. Eventually she sat. They faced each other silently across an open portmanteau. Toys and small clothes spilled out of the bag. Twice the nanny, Edith, came and went from the room without speaking.

  All the time, boisterous splashing sounded from the next room. Above the splashing he heard Ham’s solicitous murmurs and the child’s shrieks and babble. Then there were sudden disappointed wails, followed by the rush and gurgle of water pouring into other water, and then more childish laughter.

  Angelica blinked at the rumpus and looked off to the side. ‘He loves to bath her,’ she said. ‘And she lives for it.’

  Her hands moved restlessly, her face was animated and her conversation skipped along neutral subjects. Wasn’t the bathwater here most peculiar? Either it smelled of rotten eggs or tasted of smoke and salt. The management kept the bathroom locked! You had to purchase your own bath cabinet and have it delivered and pay outrageous money for water, and then it left white, crusty deposits on your body!

  ‘Not for much longer,’ he said. ‘Why did you come here?’ In his confusion his voice sounded harsh and territorial.

  ‘You’ll find this strange, but what most appealed to me about the Daughter of Midas tour was the notion of the desert.’