I had of course. But because I knew of his convict mistress, and because we both knew my stay in the island would be brief, I had considered our flirtation simply a kind of manner that develops in society between a man and woman whose real lives are elsewhere, but who are thrown together and feel they might as well make the best of the situation. We had talked, yes, but only superficially of personal matters. Our conversation was light banter, agreement and disagreement about books and music or the island’s politics, or occasionally about Rowland Rochester. I could see now, though, that he thought I was only pretending surprise; that I had solicited this proposal always intending to refuse. Speaking curtly and low, I said, ‘I believed you were not unattached.’
‘Ah,’ he said, with a trace of bitterness. ‘I should have guessed. “The island is full of noises”—but not always harmless here. Alice left me a year ago. Her common-law husband was serving a sentence at Port Arthur. When he was released on a ticket-of-leave and posted at Jericho as a constable, she went to him. I did not foresee it—but I should have. They grew up together in London as barrow children, costermongers. Looked after each other in back alleys from the time they were twelve or thirteen. Intensely loyal.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I was damp and clammy from the heat and agitation.
He shrugged slightly, frowned. ‘We had nothing in common except her son, Tom. He was five when they came to live with me, ten when they left. I’d begun to think of him as my own. He has a great talent for figures which I had hoped . . .’
He made a helpless, dismissive gesture. We were still making our way across the dry grass towards the Governor’s marquee, but the public refreshment tents were in the same direction, and it being past noon, many were heading that way. We were becoming part of a crowd.
‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated.
‘Or is it the other story that deters you?’ he continued coolly. ‘It’s half-true, but I would not be ashamed if it were wholly so. My father was Jewish, though he never practised his religion. I regret it now—that he so rarely spoke of it—and that I never asked him. I was embarrassed about it in those days. My mother was half-Irish—which some people consider as bad or worse,’ he added, with a smile.
‘No, not that! I’ve never thought of staying; living here forever . . .’ As I said this I was seized by a breathless panic, a feeling of being suddenly trapped.
‘And yet you’ve said you find it beautiful?’
‘Oh, beautiful,’ I said. ‘Hills, brilliant water, fair skies . . . and apart from that? Nothing. Only prisons. A place of prisons.’
‘“Then is the world one”, as Rosencrantz says. Or is it Guildenstern? The world is full of prisons, Hetta, we make our own. It takes courage for a woman to live here, I understand that. But look at Charlotte Lempriere, Bess Chesney, Mary Boyes?’
‘I don’t think I lack courage . . .’ I knew I sounded too defensive; I did lack the courage for it. I intended to explain that the Goulds had asked me to work with them in London on the new book, but instead found myself saying, ‘You miss the child, and might reasonably still expect to have children of your own. But I cannot . . . I . . .’
My voice sounded angry with the effort of keeping back tears because what rose to my mind was the poor little bluish face of my last baby when she was four weeks old and dying. They put her in the crib beside my bed and in my delirium I imagined that if only I could reach her she might live, but I was too weak from loss of blood, too near death myself, and when they gave her to me she was warm for such a short time and then so cold. I had learned to avoid the floods of useless weeping by swallowing hard and concentrating hard on some nearby object, but Gus Bergman undid me by taking my hand and saying, ‘Oh, Hetta, I’m so sorry.’ He added after a minute that he was sorry on my account, for my grief, but for himself it made no difference. It had never been an urgent matter for him, children.
‘Tom was an unexpected gift,’ he added, ‘Not replaceable.’
I could not answer, in utter confusion now, because I had taken off my gloves, and as he held my hand a treacherous flow of leaping warm energy entered my skin and ran up my arm to my heart and head, and suddenly I was stirred to the depths as not for years, uncertain of everything.
We were awkwardly, farcically, paused in the middle of a moving crowd, jostled together with the picnic blanket and his hat between us, and now his hat blew away and a black man brought it back. A lion of a black man, with a fierce, smiling face. Broad and strong in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, he was elegantly dressed in light summer trousers and a dark-blue jacket, and with him were two young ladies, one on each arm. He threw back his head and laughed, greeting Bergman like a long-lost friend in a strong Scottish accent—at which I could hardly refrain from laughing although I was still on the quivering edge of tears. Bergman introduced us: Mr Gilbert Robertson, editor of The Advertiser, and his daughters.
I knew of him. Everyone in the colony knew of him. The son of a wealthy Scotch sugar-plantation owner and his Creole mistress, he was one of the great characters of the town. Outspoken in defence of the aboriginal people, he showed a keen interest in new methods of agriculture, which he promoted in his editorials. He had been a neighbour of the Chesneys at Richmond for a time, and was later imprisoned by Arthur for his trenchant criticisms. Now he was sharpening his pen on the Franklins. While he and Bergman spoke I gathered my wits, hauled together the pieces of myself threatening to fly apart, like a vessel exploding from amidships.
We walked on with Mr Robertson and his daughters, who only parted from us when we reached the marquee. Bergman and I stopped and looked at each other. We would both have said more, but the opportunity was gone; we were obstructing the entry. A couple closed in behind us. Bergman said quietly and quickly that of course he would not attempt to persuade me if I was intent on going home. He had seen too many marriages made unhappy because one wished to leave and one to stay. He gave a slight bow and walked away.
For the next several hours I drank tea, watched the boat races again, spoke rationally—I suppose I did—desperate to be alone. By the time I reached my room I was furious with myself for having been so weakly tearful, and cross with Bergman for bringing me to that point. Why had I said all that? All the wrong things? Why had he chosen such an impossible place to choose to speak? And he had not asked me to take time to consider further. He had not said he loved me. He had expected me to be pleased by his proposal, to accept gratefully. Did he think I was the kind of woman to spend all her life in an out-of-the-way colony? I had been right to refuse. Of course I had.
I suddenly, desperately, wanted London. Filthy, noisy, crowded, unpredictable: a proper, ancient city. I wanted the solid weight of history in brick and stone all around me and beneath my feet, holding me steady. And above me, too, in the canopies of ancient oaks, domes and spires, the proper stars. The colony had no depth by comparison, nothing to keep you from spinning off into the wilderness. How could I promise never to see London again? And yet many had no choice. How did they feel, those who could never go back?
Next morning I began a note explaining to Bergman, but was not sure what I wanted to say. He might write to me, I thought, or come to the Bird Room to renew the conversation. For a week I lived in expectation of this, but when a note did arrive from him at the end of that time, it was a formal goodbye. He was setting off for the Huon, and doubted whether we would meet again before I left the island. He would be in touch with the Chesneys about my visit to Copping. He wished me all good things for the future. This note inspired another fit of tears, another round of self-questioning, yet it brought the same conclusion: why marry again? Why stay in the colony when I might live in London?
The following day I had a note from Louisa. She and St John had not yet removed from the Archdeacon’s. Would I call there on Sunday morning when the rest of the household would be at Church? Come alone.
She answered the door herself, huge in a shapeless sacque of an unbecoming yellowy green. Her hair was dr
agged back, bundled into a knot. She began talking before I was wholly inside, furious about St John’s renting the cottage. Another year here! He was infatuated with Mick Walker and Dido Thomas and his other black sheep, and planned to spend months at the peninsula again, while she was stuck in town with the baby, entertaining Ladies Committees.
‘But the cottage is lovely, I’ve walked past it,’ I said. ‘You’ll be freer there. You can do as you like . . .’
‘I want to go home,’ she said. ‘But St John has new reasons every day why we cannot. The reports must be finished. Jane Franklin must have her chapel at the Huon—and her College, her Museum. All these whims she has . . . like the snakes. Have you heard that absurdity? She decided when they were first here to pay a bounty of sixpence a head to get rid of the snakes—and caused havoc! Convicts left their jobs to hunt the creatures, sackfuls poured in, and it cost the Government six or seven hundred pounds.’
‘The Government paid nothing,’ I said. ‘The newspapers repeat the error, but Jane Franklin paid it all.’
‘Schemes,’ said Louisa, ignoring this, ‘which bring men gathering around her to discuss. I could almost feel sorry for her,’ she continued angrily. ‘She does it because she’s bored with her great slow Governor-husband, bored with her marriage blanc, like me.’
‘The Franklins a marriage blanc? I don’t think . . .’
‘Of course they keep up appearances, as we all do. But his parts were frozen off in the Arctic twelve years ago. Didn’t you know?’
‘Where did you . . . ?’
‘The Dorcas Society. All the wives. Jessie Montagu, Helena Forster. Mrs Gregory, the Treasurer’s wife—the woman who looks as though she chews lemons. I sit with Jeannie Macdowell, the wife of the Solicitor General, Edward Macdowell. She’s Swanston’s daughter. We sew ugly little shifts for the infants at the female factory, but really it’s an excuse to gossip. They say that’s why Jane Franklin has no children, because Franklin is not capable now.’
‘But there can be more than one reason . . .’
‘Helena Forster says it’s true.’
‘How would she know? At any rate,’ I smiled, nodding at the mound she was carrying, ‘yours is hardly a white marriage.’
A pause.
‘I used to think you so clever, Harriet,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d guessed. You can’t have forgotten what I said on the ship?’
‘No, but . . . then . . . ?’
‘McLeod.’
I tried not to gape. ‘Does St John know?’
‘He must know it’s not his own, of course!’ she said contemptuously. ‘He’s not a fool. But he’s watched me increasing like a whale, like a great fat sow—and never said a word! Can you believe it, Harriet? Not a word. Perhaps he thinks it’s parthenogenesis. He probably prays for me, an unchaste woman. Perhaps he’s forgiven me. Or this silence is his way of punishing me. I don’t know what he thinks.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t know,’ I said. ‘If you resumed your normal married life after we landed in early April there’s not much time to account for. Only two or three weeks. Men don’t think so much about these things, the dates. If it’s born now, December . . . he may think it’s simply before time, an eight-month child?
She gave me a look. ‘We have not “resumed”, as you put it. Nothing—since we left England. How could it be his?’
Another pause.
‘Why don’t you talk to him about it?’
She grimaced. ‘I’m frightened of what he might do. If he asks me whose it is, what shall I say? Or he might insist that it is his own—pretend I’m mad or lying when I say it’s not. Or write to my father, send me back with no money, nothing. Harriet,’ she seized my arm, ‘promise me if I die you’ll take the child home. I’ve sent a letter to my sister telling her that if the worst happens you’ll bring it to her.’
Her voice trembled. She released my arm, paced away, fell heavily into a chair.
‘Does McLeod know it’s his child?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘I haven’t told him. When we were at Richmond I saw him sometimes, but he’s so taken up with the Ross family . . . He might not believe me. Or again, he might deny everything. If it’s a boy he might want it, but a girl . . .’ She shrugged. ‘An amusing situation, n’est-ce pas?’
She looked the picture of misery.
‘That is why, if I die,’ she went on, ‘—and I know I will die, it will be my punishment—you must promise me to take the child back to England, Harriet, to my mother or sister. St John will probably put it in the Orphan School, or employ some convict hag to feed it on sugar-water and gin.’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘It’s upside down, a true antipodean. A “gumsucker”, a “currency lass”. Ugh!’ She pulled her face into such grimaces I had to laugh.
‘A breech delivery isn’t so uncommon,’ I said. ‘They often turn at the last minute . . .’
‘Don’t try to comfort me, Harriet. I know what it means. It makes it far more likely that I will die, or the child will, or both of us.’
‘No, it doesn’t. Charlotte Lempriere has six children and one was . . .’
‘I’m much beyond the age at which most women have their first child, and what about Lucy Granger? Do you know where her baby is? In the Orphanage, where Ewing is supervisor . . .’ She shuddered.
Lieutenant Granger had drowned the week before his wife’s confinement and she had died in labour. As for the Orphanage, it was widely rumoured that Reverend Ewing had ‘favourites’ among the little girls, whom he would fondle and caress, but nothing had been proved. Louisa got up with a grunt and moved restlessly about.
‘I should have taken some ghastly dose. Mrs Tench would have known. Like a scullery maid. And now I shall be forced to stay in this loathsome place until St John makes up his mind to leave. Or until I die. Look, I’ve written out my mother’s address.’
‘Perhaps St John would let you go home with the child, while he stays?’
She shook her head. But I saw that what I’d suspected on the ship was true; she loved St John and would not leave him.
‘At least I’m better off than Mary Price, whose husband is a brute. He wants her to do filthy things in the bedroom and when she objects he strikes her.’
‘Louisa! Good Lord! Who says these things?’
She shrugged. ‘Mary told Sophy Cracroft and Sophy has told Jane Franklin, so they say. But the servants hear things too.’
Later, as I was leaving she added, ‘And since you’re so thick with the Franklins, you’d better hint they’d be wise to attend the Dorcas Society. Jane Franklin is supposed to be patroness but she never goes and the other women don’t like it.’
‘But Eliza Arthur never attended, Sophy Cracroft says.’
‘She had the excuse of a dozen children. Jane Franklin has none—nothing to do. Saint Jane. But she’s not such a paragon of virtue. When she was in Egypt five years ago she behaved very badly, they say. It was while her husband was away at sea, a year or two after they were married. She was supposed to be travelling with a Captain Scott and his wife, who know the Gregorys, but she went off alone in a boat with a young clergyman, and wrote him a passionate love letter which Mrs Gregory has seen . . .’
I did not like the sound of this, but my mind was on Louisa’s own situation and I did not pay enough attention.
Louisa’s daughter was born a week later. A perfectly normal delivery, Dr Turnbull said. The child healthy, Louisa well. St John wanted to call the baby Theodora and Louisa said she didn’t care. He seemed besotted with the infant, his face transfigured when he held it in his arms and stared down at the swaddled form, the frowning, angry, pink little face. The room was full of flowers and gifts but Louisa was weary and indifferent.
18
I SUDDENLY FELT I COULD NOT BEAR TO STAY WITH THE CHESNEYS for Christmas. All that relentless festivity, and more farewells. I sent an excuse to Bess but did not tell Sophy, who might ask me to spend Christmas Day with the
m, although she was at this time much preoccupied with her brother Tom, just arrived from England. It was his first Christmas in the island, his nineteenth birthday on Boxing Day. He had come to be a clerk in Sir John’s office, a cheerful, delicate-looking youth who made me think of Chatterton, the boy poet. It was hoped the climate would benefit his chest. All his strength seemed to have gone into his thick, waving chestnut hair, that russetty, dark, tortoiseshell red, such a contrast with his narrow white face.
In the end I spent Christmas Day in my lodgings with Peg Groundwater and her servant, Nellie Jack. Peg’s mind was on her husband and son at sea in the southern oceans, and on past Christmasses at her little house in Stromness. Nellie said nothing of her thoughts. She was a convict woman in her fifties, morose, partially deaf, lame, not very capable. Peg wanted to send her back to the Female Factory but could not sufficiently harden her heart to do so. Nellie had been transported with a husband and son for receiving stolen goods to the value of four guineas, but both men had died. She lived in fear of the Workhouse.
My mind kept turning to London and Bergman disjointedly. I told myself that when a man proposes to a woman, of course some emotion must spring up in her. Unless the man is altogether a fool, which Bergman was far from being, some warm feeling towards him is perfectly natural, if only for his commendable taste. He must be thinking badly of me. If only I could see him and talk to him again we might part on better terms. I could explain what it would mean to me to work with Eliza in London on the bird pictures. How it might advance my prospects, lead to more work, enable me to support myself there with better success this time. Eliza believed I could. And then I thought, but what does it matter what Gus Bergman thinks? Why bother to tell him? I shall soon be gone, and in London I shall cease to think of him. It is only because I am waiting here in this dull little town that I foolishly agonise like this—and so I went round in circles.
Wild Island Page 25