David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Mr Robertson was at his desk with the morning mail. George was astonished by how little he had changed. He rose up, all freshly scented, lay aside his gold-rimmed spectacles, came round the desk, and embraced George in such warm and unaffected terms that all the resentment he had felt went soft in him and his old eagerness for affection came back in a flood. He had been very fond of Cousin Alisdair at one time.

Mr Robertson retired to the far side of the desk but was all rosy interest.

He was delighted, he really was, to see him so well-grown; to see, too, what good use he had made of himself.

Progress? Excellent. His mother was well? Dear woman. Such happy memories of earlier days. And his sisters?

George was glad of the opportunity this offered to remind Mr Robertson of how they, his mother and sisters, depended on him. Mr Robertson praised his sense of responsibility, he was gratified to see it in so young a man. They were going swimmingly, and moved on easily now to his future. Had he given it any thought? Did he have some idea of what he might do with himself?

Well he had, of course, and in the closeness that had been restored between them, and out of a natural frankness, George took Cousin Alisdair into his confidence in a way he had not originally intended. He put aside the little speech he had prepared and spoke of his feelings, his aspirations, he even ventured a stroke or two of wit; he allowed himself to show off a little, which was forgivable, surely, considering all that was at stake. In the end he made a full confession. Inspired by the usual Sunday school stories, but also by more serious reading among the explorers — and the example, of course, of their own Dr Livingstone — it had come to him, not hastily but after a proper search of his own soul and a great deal of quiet consideration, that his life, his real life, lay with the Dark Continent, with Africa. He wanted a life that was arduous; which would call on all his strength — he was physically very strong. He had no idea how Mr Robertson might feel about such things, and he was conscious, always, that he had his mother and sisters to consider and might, for the time being, have to devote himself to something more practical, to trade that is, to business — that was for his benefactor to decide, and of course if it came to that, he would knuckle under, he would be patient — but Africa was where his soul led him, he was certain of this. It was too powerful an idea to be destroyed by the years he might have to devote to moneymaking. He had no illusions about the hardships such a life might present. He was prepared for that. He looked forward to it in fact; work of a kind that would test and stretch and …

He was aware suddenly of another voice in the room. Mr Robertson had spoken; two or three syllables that had reached his ear but not as yet his understanding. Carried away by his own enthusiasm he had taken it for granted Mr Robertson would hear him out, and was astonished now to see his benefactor’s face, all rosy-cheeked and expectant, lit up by an expression of droll interest and mischievous — could it really be that? — amusement.

Australia . That was the word Mr Robertson had dropped into the room. The silence deepened around it, then spread. Had he, by any chance, Mr Robertson sweetly demanded, his eyes dancing behind circles of thin gold, considered Australia?

Well he had not. Never in his life. Not once. He grew breathless; he tried to keep the great smothering mass of it off.

Australia? He barely knew where it was. He had the uneasy feeling that it had just popped into his benefactor’s head. Out of one of those letters perhaps, that by some unhappy coincidence lay in a scatter at his elbow. The arbitrariness of it affected George with a kind of hilarity. The laughter that filled him, and threatened to break out and shatter every object in sight, echoed up from the other side of the world, as Cousin Alisdair, as if eloquent effusion was a family trait, shared even by fifth cousins, began to elaborate, all watered silk but with a glint of steel in his eye, the advantages of that other and rival graveyard — the one George had not aspired to. Friends in Sydney … Opportunities out there of the highest order … Splendid seed-ground … Seven years. (George felt the whole grey mass of it come down upon him.) In the meantime he would see that George’s mother was provided for, that his sisters had means to marry, and would be pleased, always, to hear how he was doing …

He was doing badly. The seed-ground, contrary to report, was rank and had been ruinous to him. He thought, and with bitterness, of that swaggering skip-kennel drawing his brows painfully together as he spelled his way through half a column of The Glasgow Herald , with no rich godfather to provide for him and no prospects, but, in having the whole town to swagger about in on Sundays, and so many girls to eye and make love to, and clean fingernails and an immaculate shirt, a thousand times more fortunate than he.

Everything that presented itself to his gaze in this godforsaken place told him how mean his life was, how desolate and without hope. Nobody cared for him. He never heard an intelligent word from one day to the next. Africa, he believed, would have tempered his soul to hardness and discovered the man in him. No such demands were made upon him here. The place worked its defeats in a low way. It was on every side oppressive, in all its forms clammy and insidiously sweet — lushness and quick bloom followed by a dank putrescence, so that the soul was at one moment garishly excited, brittle, overwrought, and in the next slothfully laid low. Even the natives were of a dingy greyness. Thin-shanked, dusty, undignified, the life they lived was merely degenerate, so squalid and flea-ridden that it inspired nothing but a kind of horror at what human nature might in its beginnings spring from, and in such a place so easily sink back to.

It was in this light that he considered the yammering, yowling fellow whose story he had taken down that day in his own schoolroom.

He had thought himself very clever then in making his own additions to what he had been set to write down. His fear now was that in following that frivolous urge he had allowed himself to become contaminated, and in the same idle, half-sleepy way in which he did everything here, as if nothing had meaning or consequence.

He forbad the McIvor children to let the fellow accompany them to school, and when his orders were defied — ‘We can’t help it Sir,’ they sang, ‘if he just tags along’ — took the matter up with the girls’ father. The boy, Lachlan, set out deliberately to provoke him. Instead of keeping Gemmy off, he encouraged him and a struggle ensued, of just the little niggling kind that reduced him, in his saner moments, to despair.

He was the brightest of his pupils, this Lachlan Beattie, and might easily have become a favourite; took it for granted, in fact, that he must be. Quick-witted and free in his nature, full of a pert assurance that George recognised only too well, and hungry for praise, he had done everything he could at first to draw attention to himself and win approval; and for this very reason George was determined from the start to deny it. Very deliberately, in a way that the boy was certain to recognise, he ignored him, and Lachlan, perceiving that however quick he was with an answer, however vigorously he waved his hand in the air, he would not be chosen, grew disdainful, then disruptive, then dull. Now, to his usual pointed indifference, George added sarcasm, using the presence of his ‘shadow’ to mock the boy to his companions. It was Lachlan now who kept Gemmy away.

WHEN THEIR MOTHER announced that a cousin was to come out and join them, the two girls were delighted. Kin at last, and a boy! From Scotland, from home. They were to be especially soft with him. His father had been killed in a pit accident, leaving five weans to feed; Lachlan was the eldest.