Thomas Keneally - A River Town

Not long gone when Ernie sat up again. He stripped his gloves off and let them fall to the floor, where they sat on splayed fingers. He picked up his watch and watch-chain and—as if to destroy time—hurled them to the floor.

“Go easy there, Ernie, old feller,” Tim advised him.

“You’re a bloody peasant, Tim,” Ernie complained.

Tim felt nothing but weariness. A swimmer without a stroke left in him. Kitty on the shore, frowning out to sea, could not be reached.

“You’re right, Ernie. Go very kindly to sleep, will you?”

“Winnie in your store, Tim. Your eyes were out on bloody sticks. Peasant bloody wonder…”

“Winnie is a splendid woman,” said Tim, choosing wilfully to speak about her as a presence. “You’d blame me more if I didn’t know that. Now please. You’ll disturb the poor nurse.”

“I suppose you think she’s a lady too, you stupid bushweek dolt?” The opiate had brought out aggression in Ernie. It was said to do that. The patient went best ignored.

“I have been so lucky with beautiful women,” said Ernie. But his luck made him wail for half a minute. “You think Winnie’s a noble spirit, don’t you, Tim? Winnie bloody Lady Guinevere? Reads poetry and yearns for refinement, and doesn’t get it in her poor bloody husband! Her old man though, her father the Brighton alderman, gave her piss-elegant old mum a social disease. And he… he was just one of those plain Melbourne fellows who killed himself when their shares went bust at the end of the boom. Didn’t tell you that I bet, not while she was buying the bloody bickies! Half bloody Melbourne offed itself in those days. Country’s never bloody recovered till now! Melbourne’s Australia’s elegant city , she’d say. Palaver. Melbourne’s a city of bloody horrors. Above all for the Belle of Brighton, Miss Winnie! Clapped mother, shot father!”

Tim managed to sit up straight preparatory to going across the room. But whether to hit or soothe Ernie was the question. Ernie’s pupils as huge as a cat’s now, Tim saw. His features were dissolving. Coming apart in his own sea. He wailed and wailed, and Tim eased him down. Sleep came to him suddenly, at a gulp.

Now Tim took Winnie’s letter out from beneath his mattress. It constituted a small risk beside having been kissed. The envelope was addressed to the Solicitor General of New South Wales, Macquarie Street, Sydney. It was easy to justify opening the thing—thereby, he argued with himself, he would know best how to protect Winnie, to champion her intentions.

He discovered a photograph backed by stiff cardboard. Missy looked clearly and knowingly at him from this picture. He looked again—he knew from the cricket match that care had to be taken with this identification. Missy. Not some child-woman from up or down the river. But Missy, dressed in a boy’s school uniform. She stood full length, and a banner over a painted scene behind her said, Tyler’s Touring Company . Indented across the top was the slogan: Miss Florence Meades in her Noted Role as Young Arthur . Her firmset shoulders were a fair imitation of a boy’s.

“Miss Florence Meades,” said Tim. The name was out. It escaped the barred room. It sat in the trees. That plain and essential name.

Miss Florence Meades—it seemed—was one of those young actresses who made a speciality of playing smartalec, mischievous boys from the best schools. She would have made a fine Desdemona though as well, Tim thought.

Some inscription in the bottom corner had been obscured by scratchy lines of ink. It had been deliberately and permanently rendered unreadable. On the back of the cardboard, in pencil in a cursive hand was written: Miss Meades is the young woman found deceased in the Macleay .

The handwriting was probably a disguised version of poor Winnie’s.

Ernie cried out in his sleep, as well he might. “Criminal,” said Tim to the vacant day. “Criminal.”

After one more calm survey, Tim returned the picture to its envelope, the whole thing to the breast pocket of his coat, where it sat beside his re-pocketed and useless statement of innocence. Winnie had scraped Ernie’s name out, had been uselessly loyal even in her fury. Did this doped lump of guts on the other cot across the room deserve such delicacy, a right to be harboured so kindly?

He knew the routine. He went and washed his hands with the carbolic soap which scoured the flesh. The name he had found would be released more widely than in a plague ward. It would cow the guilty everywhere, he promised himself.

Dr. Erson came later in the day, letting himself in with his key. At his shoulder, a refreshed Sister Raymond looked at Tim with clear eyes above her mask.

“Has Mr. Malcolm taken it calmly?” Erson wanted to know.

“He’s spoken in his sleep a lot,” said Tim.

He raised his chin so that the doctor could feel his glands. The name was out. Tim rejoiced secretly. Young Arthur was released from the glass.

“You have no swellings or fever, it seems,” said Dr. Erson almost in admiration. “Your pulse is normal. I approve of that, Tim, and would be grateful if you maintained it.”

A little irony in the doctor’s eyes.

“I intend to do that,” said Tim.

But Ernie refused to awaken to be chastised, and the more Tim waited, looking across the room at Ernie’s homely shape, the less scandalised Tim felt and the more an air of pity and forgiveness took over in the room. He was sure he knew where it came from. The Communion of Saints. Winnie and Florence Meades, Primrose and Lucy and Albert Rochester. The lenient dead.

It did not come from him. He was determined to punish Ernie at an early or late date, whichever proved more advisable.

In the coming time, Tim would wake at intervals with imagined fevers. Four or more times a night the frenzied awakening. In the first gulping moment his hand would race to his underjaw, his underarm. Feeling for the swelling. “Rock hard,” as Sister Raymond had sadly declared, feeling beneath Mrs. Malcolm’s chin.

Dreams of resting like a peasant beneath a huge tower, one of those great stone cylinders monks had built a thousand years ago on the Cork and Kerry coast as shelters from the Vikings. His tower the eternity of Kitty’s widowhood. The coldness of its stone entered his kidneys. Is that a shiver? Am I hot, or is it just night-fear?

Winnie the quietly dead, the softly remembered. More notably, the named Missy, Florence Meades and Young Arthur, had grown inactive at last in his brain. She did not step in through the bars to harry him.

If he woke after first light, there would be sudden, chancy joy. His mind would rub over the smoothed-out, recalculated odds of his chances of rising living out of quarantine.

According to newspapers left by Kitty or her messenger Habash at the hospital later in the week, fishermen at Crescent Head had been attracted by a stench beneath the Big Nobby and had thought it might be Lucy. It proved to be the body of a rare narwhal which had been thrown up on the rocks by the tide.

So Lucy still evasive. Not willing to present herself. Placed at the peak of the ocean she could see and judge him. And by staying out to sea and putting sombre questions, she had turned the Muslim jockey round to the valley’s most visible theology, the one that had the presbytery, the two-storey convent, the boarders two-by-two, the Angelus tower.

Sister Raymond dosed Ernie to the point of incoherence these days. Barely a finished sentence escaped him. Yet once or twice a surge of mad animation. One night Tim awoke to hear Sister Raymond shouting and her bell clanging, calling the orderlies from their hut in the grounds. Tim, in his shirt and drawers, ran into the corridor and then the recently fumigated room where Winnie had died earlier in the week, and where the nurse still slept. Ernie in a night dress two-thirds luminous from moonlight, standing over the nurse’s cot. Tim grabbed him from behind. His body felt to Tim like a warmed boulder.