David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Some echo of this had already reached George; so had the opinions of one or two local youths who, for reasons they could not have explained, had at sight of the house felt indignant, as they hadn’t been when the old girl first got hold of them. That had been a kind of joke; they had had the advantage of their youth, and of her accent and plain oddity. But the house, floating six feet above ground on its stumps, the cool superiority with which it lay claim to light and air, not to speak of the landscape it stood in, evoked a sense of raw inadequacy in them.

There was an ironwork scraper at the door. They watched and then looked away as Mrs Hutchence dragged her boots across it.

Inside, polished floors that met the soles of their feet with a disturbing stickiness. Most of all, the young woman, the niece or daughter, Leona, whose manner and dress, they had to admit, were wonderful, though none of them could venture what age she might be: ‘Thirty at least,’ they scoffed when they told of the visit afterwards. She had insisted they sit up at the table, their youth now a cheap handicap, though they were defiant in it, to talk while they drank tea.

Most of them went just the once and turned the occasion, so far as they could manage, into a joke in which it was the house and its two female inhabitants that had been on the wrong side of things. They did not mention the humiliation of the scraper or the strange mixture of embarrassment and wonder that had come to them when they looked back and saw the prints they had left, big-toed and dusty on the boards. If Mrs Hutchence hailed them now — she never forgot a name or face — they went suddenly deaf.

‘Well, here we are.’

And there it was, not at all as grand as rumour had it, rather raw and unfinished with its unpainted, corrugated iron roof, but a real house nonetheless, sitting in a patch that had been cleared and scuffled and in the fierce heat was already sprouting weeds.

The columns that supported the verandah roof had bevelled edges, and someone had taken the trouble to give them squared-off capitals. Walls of crisscrossed lattice were set in the arches between, and on either side of the wide wooden steps stood urns, empty as yet, but classic and garlanded.

He dragged the branch, as Mrs Hutchence directed, into the half-darkness under the house, then, surprised to hear a scurry of footsteps overhead, followed her up the steps to the verandah, then on into the cool interior, which he saw, with a start of emotion, was a real room, the first he had been in for more than a year. It was like stepping back into a dream place, though the wicker chairs and little bamboo stands made it too exotic to be familiar. The nostalgia it evoked in him was for a place he might have read about and only imperfectly imagined. So it was a shock when she led him through into the kitchen and he found that of the party they were interrupting, which immediately fell silent, all its members, save one, he already knew.

Gemmy Fairley was there with the two little McIvor girls, also Hec Gosper, who coloured and immediately assumed, George thought, a hostile air; and standing at the entrance to the corrugated iron recess where the stove was set, Miss Gonzales, as Mrs Hutchence called her before she gave the young woman her other name, which it seemed he was invited to use. ‘This is George,’ she told them.

‘Abbot,’ he felt obliged to add.

Hec Gosper dropped his chin to hide a smile. The two little girls, who looked very uncomfortable, pushed their noses into their tea mugs. Gemmy, with a helpless gesture and sounds of inarticulate explanation, pushed past him and fled.

‘George has been a great help,’ Mrs Hutchence announced. ‘Sit down, George. I found a nice piece of firewood, Leona, and George very kindly offered — a cup, Janet. You can choose, pet. Any one you like.’

He seated himself at the pine table, and Hec Gosper shifted to make way for him but remained unfriendly. The older of the McIvor children brought a good teacup and saucer, though the others, he saw, had mugs. Hec Gosper saw it too.

‘Well,’ he said sulkily, ‘I better be off.’

It was Leona who restrained him.

‘Dear me, why? Mr Abbot won’t mind our bit of fun, will you Mr Abbot? We’re all very easy here. We’ve been telling fortunes —’

Hec Gosper blushed furiously. The truth was that he had, till now, been the centre of such gallantries as the afternoon demanded and had acquitted himself pretty well, he thought. He was mortified that he should now be shown up before this schoolteacher . The fortune-telling was all nonsense, an excuse for Leona and him to play little games with one another that the McIvor girls, he thought, were too young to observe.

He was wrong in this. That was because he was too young. Janet knew only too well what was going on, and was fascinated, because Hector, she knew, was not much more than seventeen, whereas Leona, as far as she could work out, was — well, twenty-five at least. She knew this because when she was helping Mrs Hutchence down at the hives, Mrs Hutchence talked, and was full of stories about this place and that — they had moved about a good deal — which, if Janet had been able to put them together, would have afforded her larger glimpses of the two women’s lives than anyone else had been party to, only she did not have the experience quite to form a picture of travelling gentlemen, some of them ships’ captains, or billiard tables, or cooks who had no idea of what Brown Soup should be. She was more occupied, just for now, with the things Mrs Hutchence had to show: her china, which was bone china, which meant that when you held a cup up to the light by its delicate handle you could see through it; or the bolts of coloured silk the camphor wood chests were crammed with. These chests were themselves marvellous. They were carved all over with figures so raised that you could close your eyes, trace them with a finger, and still see processions through gardens of cherry trees and willows, with birds among the leaves, and little far-off pavilions.

‘Well,’ Hec Gosper said, reluctantly accepting to remain and see the thing through. Taking the tin mug in his fist, as if to make clear that he knew, only too well, how he had been slighted, he hid his discomfiture, and his lip, which he suddenly felt the mark of.

Leona saw the trouble he was in. She took the mug he had set down, gave him a look that might have been conciliatory but might also, he thought, be a provocation, and poured him tea from the big blue china pot she hauled from the stove, and as she did so, leaned down and whispered in his ear. Only then did she fill the teacup for George.

‘Silly!’ That was what she had told Hector in her half-whisper, though they all heard it, and you could actually see the glow that came to the boy’s soul. Janet did. She was fond of Hector, and not very fond, after all, of the schoolteacher.

There was a little rise of tension in the room. Leona, standing very tall beside the table, long-necked and with her hair darkly braided, was as overdressed for the occasion, George thought, as he was. They made a pair.

Her frock was of light cotton. ‘Freshly laundered’ was how he thought of it. Its blue lifted his heart. But his chief impression was that she was scented, and he associated that with the little half-opened rosebuds, pink on white, with which her wide collar was embroidered. The smoothness of the fine-drawn stitches moved him. They spoke of refinements he had thought he might never see again, and as he stared at them, and at the slight lifting of her breasts, he felt once again how isolated he had been in the last months, what a savage he had become. He was happy now to let some of the daintiness of those miniature emblems of ‘garden’, ‘summer’, ‘home’, which he had so much missed, attach itself to the girl; the Englishness too, though her complexion was too dark for it.