Eyre said, ‘There’s something else.’
‘Tell me. Come on, Eyre, you promised to tell me, and so you must.’
‘My—he started. Then he closed his eyes, and blurted out quickly, ‘They also circumcised me.’
‘Yes?’ asked Charlotte, although she blushed a little. ‘And is that enough to stop me from loving you? Eyre, don’t you understand, I love you; dearly, and passionately; whether you are scarred or whole. I always have done, and I think I always will.’
He took a breath, and said mechanically, ‘They circumcised me with a sharp knife made out of a cockle-shell. They also… well, I believe the correct term is subincision.’
‘What does that mean? Eyre, please.’
Eyre knew now that there was nothing for it but to show her. They had attempted to make love before, on that hideous night when Yanluga had died; and there was no question that Charlotte was a full-blooded young woman who expected sex as a vigorous part of her coming marriage. It would also be impossibly unfair of him to expect her to go to the altar without knowing what Winja and Ningina had done to him.
Pray God that her mother doesn’t wake up, he thought, and opened his trousers.
Charlotte slowly sat down on the brocade-covered sofa. She stared at his penis so intently that he went red, and began to perspire. I’m embarrassed, he thought; me, who rode naked for hundreds of miles across the plain of Bunda Bunda. Embarrassed, and for some extraordinary reason, humiliated.
But Charlotte reached out with a gentle hand and grasped him, lifting him up so that she could see how deeply the Aborigines had cut into him. The urethra was open all the way from the glans to the testicles; open, and glistening with the lubrication of nervousness and passion.
‘Will this… does this make it impossible for us to have children?’ asked Charlotte, in a trembling voice.
Eyre shook his head. ‘No. All the Aborigines have it done; at least, all the Aborigines that I met. It makes no difference, physically; and none of them seem to be lacking in offspring.’
Charlotte stroked him, with exquisite slowness, and he rose in her hand. ‘If it makes no difference,’ she said, ‘then I shall accept it proudly.’ She kept on stroking him, still slowly, until his penis reared up like a red sceptre, with a deeply cleft shaft.
‘No,’ he said, unsteadily. ‘No more. We only have eleven more days to wait.’ And with extreme difficulty he pushed himself back into his tight evening trousers, and buttoned himself up again. Charlotte touched the thick protrusion on his trouser-leg, and unexpectedly giggled.
‘I think it’s marvellous,’ she said. ‘Eyre, it’s marvellous! I shall be the only lady in the whole of Adelaide to have a baby the Aborigine way! Isn’t it exciting! Oh, it excites me! Oh, Eyre! I can’t wait eleven days!’
He kissed her on the forehead. She tasted of perfume. ‘I’m afraid that we shall have to,’ he said. Then he kissed her again, and she lifted her mouth to him, and kissed him in return, her hard white teeth pressing against his lips.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we come to the most difficult part of all.’
‘What?’ she asked, her eyes bright, ‘Eyre, if it’s only as difficult as scars, or a circumcision…’
He sat down. He looked at her, and tried to smile. She was so expectant, so alive, so gleeful. How was he going to tell her that he had solemnly promised to give his firstborn son away to Winja and Ningina, to be raised as a member of their tribe for ever more?
‘It concerns the baby,’ he said, his mouth dry.
‘But we’re going to have five babies!’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Five. But it concerns the first. Well, the first son, at least.’
Why did he have to tell her? Why did he have to give the baby away at all? Who was going to force Eyre Walker, the Protector of Murray River Aborigines, a great white celebrity and a man of influence and income, to give away his first boy-child to a pack of blacks?
Only Eyre knew why; only Winja knew why. The answer lay in the desert, and the scrub and the dry limestone mountains. The answer lay in the integrity of people who have to depend on whatever they can find, and whatever help they can offer each other. Eyre’s destiny had become mysteriously interlinked with that of the Aborigines from the first moment he had spoken to Yanluga as a human being deserving of equal respect; instead of thinking of him as an animal or a savage. He realised that there was a terrible primitive justice to what he was going to have to do. He had taken one boy away; and now he would have to give them a boy in return. There was no escaping it. Not if he was going to be able to think of himself as a man of honour; as he had always hoped he would be.
But he looked at Charlotte, sitting next to him; and she was so excited and aroused and pretty, thrilled with the erotic naughtiness of having touched Eyre’s exposed body, and intoxicated by the thought of marrying him in just eleven days’ time; and he couldn’t say it. How could he explain to her what had happened out there in the desert? How close he had been to death, and despair? How could he tell her about the magnificence of the dreaming; the majesty of Baiame; the thirsty enormity of a land which shimmered with mirages and throbbed with magic?
It was inexplicable; and his duty to Winja and his people was inexplicable. And so he said, hoarsely, ‘Our first son, I’d—well, I’d like his second name to be Lathrop.’
And after Charlotte had kissed him in delight, and run across the hall way to tell her mother how marvellous he was, he stood up, and thrust his hands into his pockets, and stared up at the portrait of Lathrop’s grandfather Duncan over the fireplace. There was laughter in the house, and the clattering of feet up and down the stairs. But all Eyre could think of was his son, not yet conceived, not yet born, but whose destiny was already entwined with this strange continent as surely and as inextricably as his own had always been.
The parlour door opened wide, and Mrs Lindsay came in, followed by Charlotte, and Lathrop Lindsay himself, and Mrs Lindsay held open her arms for Eyre and said, ‘My darling Eyre. What a fine boy you are. You can’t possibly imagine how happy you’ve made us. Lathrop! How marvellous! And how generous, too!’
Eyre held her in his arms, and smiled over her shoulder at Charlotte, but it took all of his strength not to cry.
Epilogue
On August 15, 1844, Captain Charles Sturt left Adelaide with an expedition of his own in an attempt to find the inland sea. He was so confident of his success that he carried with him a boat with which he hoped he and his companions would eventually sail from one side of the sea to the other.
Heading eastwards at first to avoid the salt-lakes which had bogged down Eyre, he made camp at Broken Hill, and then headed north. As each day dawned, however, all he could see in front of him was a country of ‘salty spinifex and sand ridges, driving for hundreds of miles into the very heart of the interior as if they would never end.’
The daily temperature was higher than 130 degrees in the shade, and nearly 160 degrees in the sun.
At last, 400 miles north of Broken Hill, after crossing a desert of crippling stones, and miles of matted spinifex, Sturt was confronted with what would later be called the Simpson Desert. Ridges of deep-red sand succeeded each other ‘like the waves of the sea’. Sturt realised that he could go no further with the resources he had brought with him, and was forced to turn back.
The expedition broke his health and his pride. In 1853, he returned to England, where his journals about his explorations had made him a celebrity, and it was in England that he died, in 1869.
He left many letters before his death. One, which was opened by his executors, was addressed to Mr Eyre Walker. When they read its contents, Captain Sturt’s executors decided that it would probably be prudent to destroy it, since its contents, although rather mysterious, might constitute an admission of liability which could cause complications with the distribution of the Sturt estate.
So it was that on a foggy January afternoon in Chancery Lane, London, twenty-nine years after Eyre had set out
from Government House in Adelaide, the last words about the great corroboree at Yarrakinna were burned in an office fireplace; Captain Sturt’s firm sloping script gradually being licked and scorched and charred into ashes; the simple words ‘Forgive me.’
For Wiescka,
and for Roland, Daniel
and Luke,
with love
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © 1984 by Graham Masterson
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