The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  Henry can still hear the heroic fury of his own voice. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  He did not listen to their proof, or thought he did not. He stood before them, proud and restive, with his head turned aside. And yet, when he ran to Nobby, he found he remembered it accurately enough.

  ‘Ah, bucko, Nobby has enemies.’ Nobby’s eyes were wet. He shook his head. ‘Harry, buck, Nobby has enemies.’

  ‘You will confound them yet, Nobby.’

  ‘That I will, bucko, in spite of their lies. Only—’ Nobby held up a warning hand—‘your father does not lie. No, Nobby does not say that. No, nor let any man say it. Not even his own son.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Buck—’

  Henry remembers his face. Red, twisted slightly on the neck, the eyes bulging with sincerity, it advances towards his own across the inn table. ‘Buck, that sainted man has been misled. He believes their lies about Nobby.’

  ‘Well, Nobby, I don’t!’

  Knowles came in. ‘Clear away, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Knowles.’

  Henry watched him clearing away. ‘And yet,’ he said aloud, ‘the hammer had hit head on. The nail had gone home.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘The armour once pierced, Knowles, is never whole again.’

  ‘That’s so, sir,’ said Knowles lightly.

  Henry let his forearms down on the desk, sank his head on them, and gave a groan so loud it startled Knowles; it was more like a roar.

  ‘Get you something, sir?’

  ‘No, Knowles. Nothing.’

  The clock whirred in its preliminary to striking, and at the same time, the midday bell began to ring.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Between ships, Frances wrote serial letters, so that when a ship arrived, they needed only postscripts of direct reply, which could easily be written in time for the return mail. She had added the postscript on her letter to Ireland, but on her reply to the last of Edmund Joyce’s three letters she had floundered. She was no longer the very dear girl of his first letter, or the dearest girl of his later ones; she was his beloved now, and his own beloved. The progression frightened her. And moreover, the text of his third letter made her serial letter obsolete.

  ‘You write with naturalness on all matters but the feelings I have expressed for you. I trust it is modesty, but fear it is more. I took my good aunt into my confidence and she advises me to ask you direct if you find my ardency unwelcome. I grow daily in the estimation of my aunt and uncle, who now speak of my taking the place of the son they lost. I do not deserve their regard, and perhaps do not deserve yours, but cannot think you less generous than they. My uncle tells me your brother’s regiment is now certainly posted to India. Momentous move! You cannot fail to comment on it in your reply to this. Do you want to go to Madras? Whether or no, you must first come to Sydney. And you must know, my dearest one, that where it takes you after that is for you to decide. Only say in reply that you are glad we are to see each other so soon, and if you can manage no more, in your modesty or horrible propriety, I will make do with that for encouragement.’

  She knew it was the chance towards which Letty had been shepherding her, and knew too that she might never get such a chance again. The blundering wonder and disbelief with which she had read his first letter had given way to the realisation that on that long voyage, she had somehow made herself indispensable to him, and that since then, she had been approved by his aunt and uncle. She was young, healthy, literate, of the established religion, much too poor to be forever journeying ‘home’, and, if more were needed, her cousin Clanricarde would tip the scales. She thought of the good stone house in the Hunter Valley, and of the stables and fine horses described in Edmund’s second letter. She thought of Robert and Lucy with the severe Scottish aunts. And she read again the letter from Hermione and Lydia.

  She could not define exactly why it disturbed her. One day she would understand that such exuberant intelligences, when lonely and undisciplined, are in danger of growing fantastic and rank. Now she could only say that Lydia and Hermione were becoming pert, and needed guidance. She had only to add a postscript to her letter to Edmund. ‘My dear Edmund, of course I do not find your ardency unwelcome, and of course I am glad we are to see each other so soon.’ She did write it, then tore it off the end of the page, then tore up the letter as well.

  She rose from her mother’s desk and wandered in perplexity about the room. She stared at her face in the mirror, yet hardly saw it. She went to the window and saw Martin working in the garden below. Although she had made no noise, he immediately began to turn, and she quickly drew back, shamed not only by having whispered his name, but by a lingering trace of her mood—or hallucination—of the night just past.

  She returned to her desk and began another letter to Edmund, but after a line or two lapsed into sketching her left hand. She put down her pen. All she wanted to do was to lay her head on her arms and sleep. She rose again and walked about the room, beating her hands softly together, almost breaking into a wail. When she paused at the window, Martin, as if she threw a long shadow, began to turn with a speed and readiness that hardly gave her time to draw back. It suggested a watchfulness for her, a deep consciousness of her, that not only angered and embarrassed her, but added to her present perplexity a vague guilt.

  She had already wasted two sheets of paper. She took out her letter book. If she drafted the letter in pencil, erasures and alterations could be made. After searching for a few minutes for a beginning, she turned aside and looked through the window. From her seated position she could see treetops, and among them, hardly intruding on the sky, the octagonal roof of Hobson’s cottage. Drifting, vague, she fell into one of her old fantasies. She would live there for ever with James Murray. With no fleshly feelings, they would live in childish isolation, learning from old books, growing fruit and flowers, taking green shaded walks, and never, never going beyond their garden. But she was no longer capable of losing herself in fantasy. Self-mockery invaded it almost as soon as it began. Wanting to laugh and to cry, she did finally laugh, and turned again to her letter book.

  For twenty minutes she wrote, striving for naturalness, often erasing a word to insert another less formal, and fighting all the time against an urgent languor of the mind, until, having covered a page, she paused to read it over. Whether it was ‘natural’ or not she could not tell; she saw only that it was false, false, and that the mental languor so hard to overcome was in reality a deep reluctance caused by self-disgust.

  She seized her india rubber and erased it all, and when she slammed shut her book and got to her feet, her suppressed wail broke from her at last, soft and entirely bewildered. Distracted, quite forgetful of Martin, she went to the window and found herself looking straight into his uplifted face. He had been waiting for her.

  Shock held her there, staring, so that he had time to grin, and to swagger with his shoulders while hitching up his trousers, a cockerel gesture repulsive to her by reason of its very pathos. She withdrew to one side of the window, buried her face in the curtains, and gave a nervous but angry laugh. She gathered the curtains in her hands and pressed them close to her face, as if she would stifle herself. James Murray had told her that on the way to and from the Eagle Farm he sometimes passed prisoners who would surreptitiously grin and salute him, or bow low to him, or otherwise mock his importance as he rode red-faced by. ‘But do you not report them?’ Frances had asked, herself inclined to smile. ‘I can’t be the cause of their punishment,’ he had replied, and had added with bitterness, ‘How well they know their mark!’

  Standing with the curtains pressed to her face, she admitted that Martin could be forgiven for thinking her his mark if she went so often to the window, and to prevent herself from absently doing so again, she pulled the bedsteps across t
he floor, and, crouching so that she should not be seen, set them as an impediment beneath the window. Retreating in the same crouched position, she began to laugh again, but again her laughter was angry, for comical though she knew her crouching shuffle to be, she resented his forcing her to it, and asked herself by what fatality she had drawn upon herself his grotesque and dogged attentions, and why, when her sister, who couldn’t pronounce her r’s and had the face of a fairy, could command instant obedience and respect, her own larger handsomeness and regular utterance should lack all such authority. And with her sudden conviction that it would always be so, and that some flaw in her character condemned her to a life of powerlessness and mockery and usage by hateful or pitiful persons, her laugh became a cry, and she sank in a heap on the floor, in tears; but on realising that she must even cry quietly, in case he should hear her in the garden, her tears quickly changed to plain anger. If he had been in the room she felt she could have attacked him, but now she could only pound with her fists on the floor and whisper in vehement wonder:

  ‘But I am a prisoner!’

  She had been awake for much of the night. Prevented at first from sleeping by the knowledge that she must have whispered Martin’s name aloud in the drawing room (for he could not have read her thoughts), she had got out of bed to write in the back of her diary, among axioms and other self advice, ‘When in company, I must never never let my thoughts drift.’ She had gone back to bed then, but the warmth was stifling, and in sudden impatience she had leapt from the bed to thrust aside the curtains and open the window as far as it would go.

  The shadow of the flagstaff had dropped out of the moonlit night and laid a broken band across her breast and upper arms. Over in the botanical gardens two segments of the octagonal roof were a flat and brilliant silver, and the brightness of the moon on the intervening land seemed to draw it nearer her window, deepening the ruts in the road and silvering the ridges. She raised her eyes to the sky. A few weeks ago she had said to Louisa, ‘I have never seen such a moon in my life before.’ And the tone of Louisa’s reply, so desirous, so dismissive, had lingered in her mind.

  ‘Oh, the moon, the moon.’

  Last night it had travelled in a turquoise aureole so wide and bright that no stars could shine in its proximity, though elsewhere they crowded in crazy multitudes. And in that aureole the moon itself seemed slightly crazy, seemed to roll too fast, to tip unsteadily. And yet, for all its turmoil and speed, the total effect was one of ineffable peace. It fascinated Frances deeply, all but hypnotised her. Deeply breathing, she drew in the smell of a white waxy flower, and of the turned earth and the outside privies, but when, in a spontaneous experiment in total acceptance, she raised both arms and breathed deeper still, the predominant smell was yet another, the warm heavy smell of river mud at low tide.

  It could only have been an hallucination that that smell of mud, as if personified, had reached out to her body, extended by her raised arms, and stroked her. The servants at home had warned her to crush her carnal longings, which, they said, would lead her to hellfire, or to bearing a bastard, or both, and from the pulpit she had been given much the same advice. So when, at idle moments, she had been visited by mild voluptuousness, and had combated it with physical busyness, she had believed herself to be obeying these edicts. But in fact she had not known until last night what carnal longings were, nor had taken into account until then the possibility of their gratification outside marriage. Neither knowledge nor feeling had been fostered in her; she had lived among people who shunned erotic display, and what intimations might have reached her from books had been occluded by the web of romance. She had often read of longings for a lover, but ‘longing’ had been only a word until then, when, with her arms still raised above her head and her body extended, amazed, confused words formed in her mind.

  ‘Why—why—anyone would do.’

  These words, formed within sight of the trodden roads and the commandant’s garden, chilled her into sobriety, for ‘anyone’ must include not only the commandant, whose image flashed first into her mind, but Gilligan, Martin, even the poor creatures in the iron gangs. And this image of the convicts, crowding into her mind, discredited the whole emotional mood, making it squalid and fearful.

  Ashen mosquitoes had drifted in through the open window. She slapped the stings on her bare arms. She already felt that mood to have been bizarre—so uncharacteristic of her that she was quite sure that nothing of the kind would ever happen again. By the time she went back to bed, hallucination seemed its only explanation. The mosquitoes had kept her awake with their buzzing and stinging, and the moonlight on the white sheets becoming unbearable at last, she had risen, drawn the curtains close again, and then, though hot, restless, and half-dreaming, had slept until early morning.

  Now she heard the midday bell, and a panic started in her mind for the letter not yet written, the decision not yet ratified. She raised herself to a kneeling position on the floor and dabbed at her eyes with her frilled sleeve. She knelt there as if in a trance, looking with half-shut eyes at the bed-steps beneath the window (but seeing in her mind’s eye Martin standing below as if affixed there for ever) until suddenly, in three seconds, her determination became firm, and the right reply composed itself in her head. She jumped to her feet and went—strode, indeed, with her old graceless stride—back to her desk. She put the letter book aside and took a clean sheet of paper.

  ‘My dearest friend . . .’

  The words warmed her, as if they were true, and added to her determination. He belonged to a former and distant part of her life. She could neither see his face nor hear his voice. She was turning him to her own purposes, but for that, and for the bold deceit of the words she was writing, she would make amends by being the best of wives. If she could not love him, she would cherish and obey him. And as his wife, she would never again be anybody’s victim. Authority would be hers at last, as it was Letty’s (she now perceived) partly, at least, because her husband, even in his absence, left it wrapped about her like an invisible cloak.

  ‘. . . and so, my dear one, rather than offend you again with my sad stiffness, I tore it into tiny pieces, and now have time only to write that your ardency could never, never be unwelcome to me, and as to our early meeting, I look forward to it with all my heart. Pray have the kindness to convey my respects to your uncle and aunt.

  Signing herself ‘your own Frances’, she was suddenly overcome by a hard triumphant excited greed for the material things she had never permitted herself to covet, but which now lay in her expectations. She suppressed it out of shame as well as duty, but it left her feeling self-possessed and adult, as if in some way it were needed to sanction her decision. She turned the page to the blank side, wrote Edmund’s name and address in graceful copperplate in the centre (did he display her letters to the Annings?), then folded it inwards so that the four corners met and concealed the text. When Madge Noakes presently came in, her arms full of mosquito netting, she was looking for the little brass lamp she used to melt her sealing wax.

  ‘Where is my wax lamp, Madge?’

  ‘Took to be trimmed and cleaned, miss.’

  ‘Pray fetch it.’

  She already spoke, she fancied, with the voice of government: calm, benign, unflawed by the personal. But when Madge had been gone for a minute or so, and Martin came through the door, carrying a ladder, and his eyes springing, as always, so eagerly to hers, she did falter, hitched for a moment on that snag of pity and shame. But almost at once, she was able to marshall her new forces.

  ‘What do you want, Martin?’

  His look of startlement at her coolness confirmed her need of it. ‘Putting in a new sash cord, miss.’

  ‘Is it not your dinner hour?’

  ‘Madam said—’ he stopped and scowled, trying to assess the change in her.

  ‘What did madam say, Martin?’

  ‘She said, madam did
—’ he was slow, surly—‘she said, do this now. Have dinner later. Miss,’ he added.

  Frances glanced at the pile of mosquito netting Madge Noakes had left on the bed. Letty, of course, had ordered the two jobs done simultaneously so that her sister should not be left alone with a male prisoner. ‘Very well, Martin,’ she said, pondering that while she was still with Letty, she must take care to acquire as much as possible of her unobtrusive ways of management. Edmund and she would have many assigned servants. She would certainly suggest that he pay them as free labourers, but if that were really as impracticable as people said, if it would really lead to bankruptcy, they would still treat them as well as possible: they would forbid the lash, tend them in illness and old age, and she would teach their children with her own.

  But Martin had not begun to work. He was standing by his stepladder, and was staring at her. She picked up the letter from Ireland and began to read it again, but saw, at the edge of her vision, that he had put one hand on a hip. She felt his gaze on her neck and began to wish for Madge Noakes to come back.

  ‘I don’t eat dinner in barracks,’ he said suddenly.

  She made one of those murmuring noises, derived from Letty, but did not look up.

  ‘You know I don’t. You know I eat it here.’

  ‘Of course, Martin,’ she said with mechanical kindliness, intent on the letter she was not reading.

  He dropped suddenly to a level of secrecy. ‘You’re for us, ain’t you?’