Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“I’ve read of it,” said Erson, frowning down at Primrose. But you knew straight away he hadn’t really read of it.

Winnie said, “My mother was out shopping with her maid in Melbourne when caught by one of those quite terrible summer storms which bring the temperature falling. The maid insisted on running into some hovel in the city and coming out with an aunt’s coat. My mother was grateful for it even though the garment wasn’t of the cleanest. We surmised it was then she suffered the fatal lice bite.”

Still nursing the cat, Winnie began to shed gentle tears, no frenzy in them. An orphan modestly requiring of God the causes of extreme events.

“The fatal bite,” she reflected. “You know, I didn’t like Primrose. Ernie’s choice. I wish her no harm but do not like her. Do you think God is mocking me now, Dr. Erson?”

She seemed at that moment just about ready to fall. Erson seized on this helplessness of hers. “Sit down now in that tall-backed chair, dear lady. That’s exactly right. I would like you to place that cat of yours on the floor at your feet.”

In both respects—to Tim’s surprise—she obeyed him. Erson rose and walked towards her then, making hushing sounds until her tears ceased. He did not approach too closely though. Looking down, he surveyed from his full height the cat and its patchy coat.

“Make her some tea, Tim,” asked the physician through his mask. “Could you do that?”

Tim moved to do it. Wishing to prove his promptness to the doctor who thought him suspect for visiting the plague camp and failing to send Pee Dee to the knackers. But before going, Tim stepped up close to the doctor. “I was hugged and much breathed on by Mrs. Malcolm,” he confided. “Not her fault of course—you see how she is.”

Erson shook his head. “God, Tim, you’re quite a lad,” he said softly.

Tim feared he’d betrayed Winnie somehow. “No, I was kissed when she was upset. I didn’t choose it, and she didn’t either in this awful distress. Something disordered in her, you see.”

Erson looked at Tim with something far too much like pleading. “Come with me then. I’ll have you gargle. It might be of some use.”

Leaving drowsing Winnie and Primrose, they went out the back and found the fire in the cookhouse was out. And so no tea. For who had the spare intent to get a fire going in the stove on such a morning. The doctor took what seemed to be carbolic from his bag and mixed some with cold water from the tank. Wrigglers in it just like the last water he’d drunk at the Malcolms’, but the carbolic made them frantic.

Erson watched Tim gargle and spit by the cookhouse door. He seemed still to be weighing Tim. To hell with that!

“I haven’t caused this, you know,” Tim told the doctor. “And I was kissed and held firmly. All against my will.”

But he remembered what some could describe as earlier desire, and his face burned.

Erson said, “I don’t so much want to be here, deciding on you one way or another. But you were the one who came to me. You could have gone to Dr. Casement or Dr. Gabriel, but came to me!”

“But now we need to be quarantined. Not you though?”

Erson’s eyes above the mask considered him in sorrow. That was worse than anger. “I will not go home again from the hospital until your quarantine period is done with. The other Macleay doctors will look after my normal patients. I will be on call for you alone. I shall need to be bathed and my clothes fumigated just as with you, Tim.”

Nothing to be said then. Nothing to be hoped for. Except Tim did say, “I didn’t understand. You’ll find me a good patient.”

They returned to the living room where Winnie drowsed and Primrose raved. Fragments of words came out. Or perhaps the other, half-remembered language.

Outside in the garden, Ernie had stopped pacing. Through the windows it could be seen that Hanney had arrived on a police mount. He was dressed not as Tim had seen him emerge from the Armidale Road an age past—not in cavalryman’s breeches, but in the usual dusty navy blue. Erson rushed across the room and lowered his mask with his white glove to call orders through an opened pane.

“Please, Ernie. Come inside now. Constable, don’t you come in but wait there.”

Hanney paused on the garden path and saw Tim behind Erson. Tim didn’t doubt he’d been spotted. It was clear in the slow triumph of the constable, the way he shook his head. Not surprised to see Shea his humiliator in the matter of plague camps. Now at the plague’s centre. He stepped a few paces closer, took his hat off and watched hard.

“That’s Shea the grocer in there?” he called. The presumption of guilt. Suspicion confirmed. And so on.

Erson cried, “Exactly,” before adjusting his mask. Hanney stared a little longer. Looking on Tim as familiar and instigator to all the tragedies—Albert, Missy, Lucy, and now perhaps, the worst of all.

“Thank you, constable,” cried Dr. Erson. “You could wait by the gate for the district ambulance!”

Meanwhile Ernie stepped listlessly up onto the verandah. The far-off river could be seen violet behind him. He paused on the verandah and came in then, opening and closing the door, and appeared in the living room. Self-imprisoned on his hearth.

Watching him now, Tim felt an enlarged sense of damnation, of the separation of Hanney’s normal dusty police blue from his own grey cloth coat.

All the unmade and unmakeable calls—Kitty, Mrs. Sutter, Hector, customers—in turn itching in him. Ernie called to his wife. “Are you feeling not too badly, dear?”

But Winnie did not answer, though you could hear her shifting in her chair. Dr. Erson had crossed the living room to approach the corner table. He picked up one of the china plates and inspected it.

“Winnie’s new set,” cried Ernie, and when Erson did nothing more than nod, Ernie turned to Tim. “What were you doing here anyhow? Drumming up business or pouring the bloody gin into a man’s wife?”

“I asked your wife to intercede for me. Tell you that I’d asked for nothing more than to be paid. Three months’ credit is enough, Ernie. And while we are bloody at it, I have written a statement I wanted to deliver to you.”

He took the letter pleading his innocence from his breast pocket. But remembered he was meant to keep his distance.

“I wish to give Ernie this letter,” Tim told Erson.

“Hold on to it for now,” murmured the doctor, putting one of the plates down.

Seven days’ quarantine. There would be time to talk to Ernie.

“So china, eh?” Dr. Erson asked.

“Yes,” said Ernie. “A present for my wife.”

“A peace offering,” murmured Mrs. Malcolm to herself. “A dove. An olive branch.”

“Just settle down, dear,” weary Ernie advised her.

“China,” said Dr. Erson. “From China by way of David Jones. And it came in a crate?”

“Yes. Very flash.”

“The ungrateful wife!” said Winnie Malcolm theatrically.

“I did find a deceased rat in the crate,” Ernie confessed. “Took it out and threw it to the back of the yard. However, found it bloody dragged back into the house by that cat. I took it finally and properly burned it.”

At the mention of the cat, Winnie Malcolm bent to pick the creature up again.

“No, Mrs. Malcolm,” Erson cried out.

“You can’t get plague from a cat, can you?” Ernie asked in a pathetic husbandly voice. “Your cat may be very ill, dear,” he explained to Winnie without waiting for Erson’s answer.

Dr. Erson’s grimness of movement. No longer that of the matinee actor. He took off gloves already perhaps sullied by contact with Primrose, and felt Winnie’s brow and the glands under her jaws, and then her underarms. After vanishing to wash his hands like a modern physician, he returned and repeated his medical exercises with Ernie and then Tim. Tim had had to try to read the doctor’s eyes as the other two victims were gauged and handled, but now he felt Erson’s masterly cool fingers probing at his armpits. They were somehow a sacrament of comfort.