The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  But though this desire was evoked by that good thief Mrs. Bryant, Ralph was surprised to find it did not carry her face. Increasingly, as Silvia achieved all the vigour of a girl playing a boy and enjoying it, his excitement, theatrical and sensual at the same time, called up what he now thought of as the generous features of Mary Brenham.

  For in watching Brenham man-and-boy it around the clearing, Ralph began to see a certain size to what she had done in London when she was a thirteen-year-old. She had decked herself with male and female clothing—the clothing of Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, the people whose child she had been taking care of. The Kennedy wear had not been of astonishing value, but she had taken more than was to be advised by either greed or slyness. There was therefore, he concluded, a streak of excess in Mary Brenham, that excellent convict and single offender, that paragon mother of a tranquil boy-child.

  So a chord of excitement ran between Ralph and Bryant and Brenham and Arabanoo during the rehearsals which the native attended, and Ralph was sure he knew not only that Bryant had been so kind to the ab origine man, but could also make a guess as to when.

  Strangely it did not seem as if Dabby Bryant could do much for her large and sullen husband, Will.

  Harry Brewer, Ralph knew, had spent some time trying to appease Will over his flogging. Harry felt he owed the lag this, since Dabby had nursed Duckling through the flux aboard the Charlotte. Harry had determined by questioning that by the time Will had been flogged for stealing fish from the government catch, he had served nearly five years of a seven-year sentence. Among the documentation which the Home Office had failed to give H.E. before the ships left the Motherbank had been the official court records. There was no absolute way of proving Will’s date of sentencing for trying to throttle an exciseman. Harry would comfort him and say the papers would arrive in the end and verify the sentence—that it was merely a matter of time passing and of distances being covered, that there were clerks in the Home Office keeping the score and also, one hoped, being flagellated for their tardiness.

  But it seemed that Will shared with Ralph and Robbie Ross and others the feeling he had passed through a mirror, a fiery and transforming one. “It buggers up,” said Will, “the numbers on the page.” Therefore, times stated at the Devon Assizes did not mean anything here—the meaning of time and term and condemnation had been transmuted, syllable by syllable, during the voyage. Harry argued with Will that his punishment could in no light be looked upon as cruel or exceptional. The same day Will had suffered at the triangle, a convict named John Ruglass, who had stabbed his lover, a very ripe but very drunken London girl, had stood through three hundred fifty lashes, a number which dwarfed Will’s. But Will lacked the mind for numeration. The blows which landed on him were absolute blows and not arithmetic. And his mania was indeed strong if Dabby Bryant could not, through her nightly ministrations, deliver him of it.

  Will therefore went on answering Harry in the spirit of his perceptions. “It was all too cruel and all too usual, Mr. Brewer. And as for untoward, that savage of your captain’s, that heathen catamite, he eats for breakfast more fish than I tried to sell off through my fence, Joe Paget.”

  So despite Harry’s advice and Dabby’s consolations, Will could not be appeased. Speaking to Bryant, said Harry, had advanced his understanding of the Americans—the nameless American fisherman behind the screw gun in a smack off Hampton Roads who had once fired a shot at the Ariadne, a mysterious shot since it could not hope to do harm and was as evanescent as a political opinion. That man’s stiff back and sense of self-ownership were what Harry saw again in Will Bryant.

  Ralph was uncertain why Will could not be reconciled by his own wife. But he was now very sure that she had with ease delivered Arabanoo of his torment, and he could also speculate with accuracy when she had given the Indian the cure.

  It was the last time the storeship Supply had sailed off to Norfolk Island. A number of people had gone aboard her for the trip down harbour—Davy Collins, Ralph, H.E., Arabanoo, his guardian, Bill Bradbury. Arabanoo had shown no reluctance to get into the cutter at the landing on the east side of the stream, but as the party drew near to where the Supply sat moored he began to speak in a high, musical, alarmed voice. Davy Collins started to question him in the Cadigal tongue. “He says island, island,” explained Davy. “He’s alarmed that the Supply is another country.” Or worse, thought Ralph. If he thinks we are fallen stars, he believes we are taking him to the sky.

  The Supply was a tubby little two-master, no longer than a cricket pitch, as narrow in the girth as Ralph’s abominably cramped parlour in the married quarters at Plymouth. It was hard to imagine how anyone could consider it a strange and dangerous continent unto itself. His Excellency and Ralph and Davy had begun at once to utter soft reassurances to the native. “Pirrip, Pirrip,” Arabanoo chirped in reply. It was his version of H.E.’s surname, Phillip. He had no doubts that the complexly smiling H.E. could save him from strange passages.

  “We are just going down harbour,” H.E. kept saying. “A small tour to the Heads. Manly the land of pat-a-garam, kangaroo.”

  When the cutter nudged along against the side of the Supply, the Indian climbed the steps, tremulous, urged along at the elbow by Pirrip. Ralph was aware as he himself reached the deck that the Captain and everyone else artificially stiffened their legs, as if feeling for the first time every nudge of the tidal water against the timbers of the Supply, the way it ran like an animal tremor up through the deck and into the soles of the feet. They moved with this comic heaviness—Ralph among them—to demonstrate to the native the nature of the Supply, and how it could be walked upon.

  Arabanoo seemed to be comforted and adopted a picnic attitude. He asked if he could have “The King.” H.E. thought it might be good for the native—in his distraught state—to be given a little brandy.

  It was a crowded deck on which Arabanoo drank his tumbler of spirit. The Supply had taken on board that day twenty-seven convicts whom H.E. was hiving off to Lieutenant King at Norfolk Island. The volcanic earth of the place and the rich seas would feed them better than the more niggardly soil around the grand harbour here. There was a three-year-old orphan as well—Edward Parkinson—in the care of one of the older females. He was the only fragment left of a ruinous love affair aboard the Friendship, one which Ralph had been affected and oppressed by but which later he thought would make a quite suitable romance story for The Gentleman’s Magazine. Jane Parkinson, a Manchester milliner who had stolen calico from her employer, had been ill of flux aboard the Friendship, and was tenderly attended to by the second mate, a likeable young Scot called Patrick Vallance. Ralph and Vallance had got on well, because Ralph had an aunt, Mrs. Hawkings, in Midlothian, in the same village of Musselburgh from which Vallance’s family came.

  In Capetown H.E. had shifted the women out of the Friendship to make room for livestock in the forward hold. Vallance had missed Jane Parkinson bitterly enough to get drunk. It was a day when a strange yellow haze hung over Table Bay, and in the haze Jane Parkinson’s lover had staggered off to the heads to urinate, had fallen over the side, and sunk at once as if with the weight of loss. Though three seamen jumped in and dived for him, in that sulphurous mist you could not see an arm’s length.

  A day later, the baby Edward Parkinson’s mother, Jane, Vallance’s mistress, was wracked by an irreversible dysentery. Some of the older lags on the Lady Penrhyn looked after the child. Five days out of the Cape, she died of exhaustion and wastage just as the fiercest band of winds began to strike the fleet and sweep them on through that mirror of Will Bryant’s. The surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn later told Ralph that when she was lowered over the side, three whales appeared, giving some bulk to the mute, skeletal presence she had maintained on the Friendship and the Lady Penrhyn.

  Now they were taking her son to the outstation. In all geography there was nothing more ultimate. H.E. had instructed Lieutenant King that five acres of the island were to be farmed in the boy’s name from the t
ime of his arrival there.

  A similar five acres were to be farmed for the girl child on board, Mary Fowles, whose mother, Anne, had been the one stabbed the month before by her lover. Mary Fowles was five years old, and able to stand on the spardeck with no more restraint than the hand of one of the women convicts. Mary had been taken from her mother by order of Davy Collins. Anne Fowles was a drunkard and could just as easily and erratically be either tender or savage to the child. Fowles’s merciful friends had made her drunk the night before her daughter was shipped away in the Supply. To those who watched aboard the Supply, the Fowles child seemed quite equable about her future, which was to become an outlander of outlanders. She was a small woman under her own management. Whereas Arabanoo was like the baby boy, Parkinson, and did not know what was being planned for him.

  The harbour was nearly bisected by a sandstone jut of land which H.E. had permitted to be named—without particular distinction—Middle Cape. This was the home of some natives whom Davy Collins had identified as the Camarai. From them Arabanoo’s people on the north of the harbour drew their wives. It was known now that from here Arabanoo had captured his wife—it was all done by ritual abduction, a strange business, thought Ralph, but not so very different from the European mode of marriage.

  That plump bitter-mouthed woman, then, who had on the day of Arabanoo’s capture tried to prevent him from playing the word game and had hit Ralph’s shoulders with her digging stick, that was the wife Arabanoo had raided away from the Camarai. It was understandable that in Arabanoo’s geography, therefore, the Camarai headlands, layered in sandstone and covered with the coarse and distinctive foliage of the new earth, shone like remembered combats and desires, and he raised his arm, saluting them, uttering one long and languorous word in the native plainchant.

  But then the Supply heeled over, as if renouncing those familiar cliffs. The sails were noisily reset above Arabanoo’s head and the prow came around to aim itself fair between the harbour’s two headlands, which were the pillars of his known world. Now Arabanoo began to struggle with himself. As with an epileptic, you had the impression of a man fighting with hands no one else sees. The effort nonetheless looked to Ralph as if it might split the cords in the native’s throat. As H.E. moved towards him, Arabanoo ran to the sky-high weather gunnel and, bruising his leg savagely against it, pitched himself out into the air and thence into the sea. Ralph heard the blow as the deep water of the bay struck him. He swam clumsily, fighting the petty officer’s uniform which deadened his strokes. Like a duck he thrust his head towards the profoundest bed of the bay, as if he meant willingly to sit on the bottom and drown. But the naval uniform buoyed him and only his head would go beneath the surface. As he continued to stroke and strain to dive, they swung out the boat to come after him. He wallowed away from Davy Collins’s arm extended towards him, but an oar blade—by accident—clouted him behind the ear. Dazed, he was lifted by both armpits from the water and dumped into the belly of the cutter.

  They brought him back to the stairs on the port side of the Supply and dragged him onto the deck, where H.E., Pirrip, was waiting for him. Ralph helped him sit against the pumpdales and caressed his shoulders. Lieutenant Ball’s steward brought him more of “The King.” It was clear to Ralph—and surely to Pirrip—that the native now thought he had been absolutely magicked by them. He must, for his sanity’s sake, somehow be shown that it was not so, that he was not held by sorcery.

  Ralph was therefore surprised to see that although H.E. showed annoyance mildly, he nonetheless showed it. He ignored Arabanoo. When the Supply hove to so that H.E. and Davy and Ralph could board the cutter for the return to Sydney, H.E. walked the entire distance of the companionway before extending his hand towards where Arabanoo sat, slumped, a wooden rather than a melancholy expression on his face. Arabanoo became aware of H.E. calling to him. He jumped up, his eyes glittering, his lips parted. He joined his hands together in a sort of candid gratitude. If your soul is absolutely owned by somebody, it is best to be on side with him—that was what Arabanoo was frankly, and by gesture, saying. He rushed down from the helm to the companionway and in ten seconds was seated beside H.E. in the cutter. Davy Collins, climbing in behind him, clapped his shoulder and put a hand on his knee. “We’re going home,” he told the ab origine Indian gently.

  Back in Sydney, Arabanoo dined voraciously on two kangaroo rats, both as big as rabbits. He was, Davy Collins said, exquisitely pleased not to have been taken away to the sky. All at once he began to call H.E. Be-anna, Father, again. H.E. seemed flattered by the name, simply that. He thought Arabanoo was overwhelmed by honest affection, instead of seeing that the native spoke to him with all the loving, horrified, and ambiguous awe with which Moses spoke to Jehovah. He did not understand how profoundly the native was surrendering himself.

  But Dabby Bryant, whose fishing shack was beyond Arabanoo’s hut, and who had her ear for unhappy dreamers—she would have understood the native’s bewilderment. In a way, she was a native herself, since the Cornish had a tribal disposition.

  So it was the night of the day Arabanoo dived from the deck of the Supply that Mrs. Bryant had come across from the fishing camp to give the native back some management of his soul. And that, Ralph was sure, was what lay behind the grateful hilarity with which Arabanoo now watched Dabby Bryant play Rose on the afternoons H.E. brought him to rehearsals.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Play and Poetry

  One of the scenes which most delighted Arabanoo was the one in Act Four, where Rose bullies her simpleton brother Bullock as Silvia enters dressed in a man’s white suit. Mary Brenham had not been in the white suit yet—it was to be a calico thing which Frances Hart had not yet braided and sewn buttons on. But the clothes thief had managed to achieve a sort of white suit strut which—to Arabanoo as to Ralph—went in delicious counterpoint to Rose’s country forthrightness.

  Since Arabanoo and H.E. both found the sight of women bullying a man so funny, it was apparent to Ralph that throughout the universe one of the comic staples of all societies must be a weak man at the mercy of a sharp woman. Ralph remembered the blow he had taken from the Indian’s plump wife on the day of Arabanoo’s capture. There had been—according to Harry Brewer—a brisk woman in H.E.’s history too. For H.E. had married a young widow called Margaret when he was twenty-five, and she had left him before he was thirty.

  Whenever Harry Brewer spoke to Ralph about the times he had been quartered with H.E., either aboard ship or down on Vernal’s Farm in Hampshire, Ralph picked up a slight sulphur stench of eunuch shame—H.E.’s rather than Harry’s. For the young widow had brought to the marriage two farms—Vernal’s and Glasshayes—which the young H.E. had run competently. Twenty years after the marriage died and Margaret Phillip went off to London, H.E. was still bound to the conjugal farms, personally running them in peacetime, and during war, in the main cabins of the Ariadne and the Europe, mailing his directions for harvest and market back to the New Forest from Havana, Rio, Capetown, Goa.

  It is one thing to manage a farm while you are a spouse, and another to be still bound to it by obligation after your company at table and bed has been rejected. Harry, loyally, never pointed up the difference in so many words. That H.E. liked farming somehow increased rather than diminished this faint redolence of shame. They were not his farms. They were the rump of his marriage. In every attention he gave them he declared himself for what he was—a man without his own fortune, the son of a foreign dancing instructor. A man who had to live, that is, off property that had come to him from his wife’s first husband, whose only shame was the excusable one of having died.

  The nature of the war with the Americans—both the Spaniards and the French having made an alliance with the rebels—had sent H.E. and Harry on an escort journey to India, from which they had returned to find the entire conflict settled by treaty. H.E. had taken his secretary, Mr. Midshipman Brewer, to dinner at Chuddock’s. Afterwards they went walking in the polite streets off the
Strand and so ran into Mrs. Phillip, with her sister and brother-in-law, about to enter a house in Henrietta Gardens. It seemed to Harry that the brother-in-law was not too pleased to encounter H.E. and tried to hustle the two women he was leading into the house where they were going to dine. The brother-in-law, said Harry, had made a fortune out of pepper, curry, and tea. As he half turned to H.E., the glittering authority of a colleague’s splendid house behind him, two black footmen either side of the door, he showed in his face all too sharply his sense of the redundancy of the two men he was trying to avoid meeting.

  And they were indeed redundant—the conflict with the Americans and the French had just been settled in Paris; the Europe’s men had been paid off. This ship sat at Deptford empty of a crew. In these circumstances a forty-five-year-old captain is a model of superfluity. A forty-five-year-old midshipman is, however, the peak of it.

  This meeting was the only time Harry ever had a chance to look at H.E.’s estranged spouse. Mrs. Phillip was slim and slope-shouldered with neat features. Her mouth was small and straight but had in it a large eagerness for experience. Her eyes were round—she was a little bird, said Harry. It seemed to him that there was still an edge of anger in her to do with whatever incident or lack of incident had driven her from the house—though you could just as easily describe it as wry forgiveness.

  They discussed very little—the brother-in-law could not understand how the Navy had not been capable of bringing the Americans to heel. What had been lacking throughout, he said, had been a serious intention on the part of the British Government to do so. H.E. asked him with that bright-eyed politeness which would later so annoy Robbie Ross how importers such as he had suffered from the American intransigence. The merchant answered—as if explaining things to a child—that of course Newport News and Savannah and New York and Boston, where he had once sold his East Indian imports free of duty—wonderful markets on a prosperous seaboard—must be a vast loss. The Captain had to remember, continued the brother-in-law, that insurance rates had gone mad and had not come down following the peace treaty.