David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

They have been married for thirty-three years. She has followed him in his progress — or decline — halfway across the world, and further each year from her real life, which is, he knows, in their children. She is cleverer than he is but does not make him feel it. Cleverness, she knows, has nothing to do with what he is after; which is revelation. What will be revealed, he believes, is the unique gift that is in each man and woman, in each creature and plant too — what else has his study of nature shown him? — and must also be in him: a gift he alone can give to the world, and which without him it must lack.

She sits with the music spread in her lap. The piece has come to an end. Quickly, feeling his gaze, she looks up, makes a face, not at all the face of a woman in her sixties — a child, it might be, playfully poking a tongue at him — then places her hands on her hips, leans far back from the waist, and yawns.

The other women in the settlement found the minister’s wife poky. It had got about that she was the cousin of an earl, maybe a duke, and they had hoped for glimpses in her of the romance of birth, even in the reduced form, up here, of a silver milk jug or a set of crested spoons. They wanted a hint in their vicinity of pride, high custom, refinement. That the Frazers were poverty-stricken was no impediment. That was his fault.

But she fulfilled none of these easy expectations and might even have set out, in her brusque way, to thwart them. She was a small freckled person, though fine-boned, with a mass of hair that had once been red-gold and was now rusty and none too well controlled. She was dutiful enough in her enquiry about the health of children, but did not always remember their names. Once a month she received a parcel of books and other papers from one of her daughters, the elder one at Aldershot (the other lived at Poole and there was a son in Canada who taught school), which she herself went into Bowen to collect and would immediately, right there at the steamer-wharf, tear a corner from, like a child with a loaf of bread; she was so hungry for its contents.

They would have liked to send their girls to her to be improved with a little needlework of the fancier kind, but she had no skill with a needle, even, as you could see from Mr Frazer’s shirts, in the plainer way of buttons and hems. Many of them, poor as they were and with no claim to gentility, were better managers than she was and had a higher regard for what they thought of as the refinements. The one thing you could say of her was that she did not give herself airs. They would have complained if she had, but when she did not they felt cheated of the bit of colour she might have shown them, which would have been a greater comfort here than absent-minded kindness or charity.

‘I want to speak to you about something important,’ she says from the bed while her husband is still undressing. He looks surprised, then comes in his shirtsleeves to sit beside her. He loves these late moments of intimacy between them.

‘Charlie, something very serious has happened,’ she says, ‘you mustn’t be upset.’ She goes back a week to Gemmy’s visit from the blacks, then, too quickly for him to quite make the connection, to the attack at the McIvors’.

He feels the blood come to his cheek. It is only partly indignation and a kind of shame at so much baseness; there is also the personal embarrassment of having it brought home to him, yet again, how out of touch he is. He has heard nothing of this; seen nothing either.

‘Who can have done such a thing?’

His wife does not reply. Today the men of the place, shamefaced perhaps, have kept out of sight. It is the women who have been busy.

‘I know you believe there is no harm in the man,’ she tells him, ‘and I’m sure you are right. There is none. But people are afraid. There is harm in that. It would be best — Millie Sweetman thinks so, and she is a very sensible woman — if he were put where they can do him no harm. Where he wasn’t quite so — visible. Of course, the best thing of all would be to send him away altogether — to Brisbane, if it could be arranged. But in the meantime — I’ve already spoken to her — Mrs Hutchence would take him in.’

So it was arranged. No one, not even his wife, has thought it worth consulting him.

‘Charlie,’ she says gently. She takes his hand. ‘It had to be done as quickly as possible. The McIvors can’t be left with him, they’ve already suffered, and there are children to consider. It’s true there’s no harm in him, but he is a danger just the same. Not through his own fault, poor fellow. It was best to let Millie Sweetman take over — people will accept that. And you know what Mrs Hutchence is,’ she adds lightly. ‘They won’t try their nonsense with her.’

But the heaviness on his heart will not shift. His one consolation is that he knows at last what he must do, and who his report is for.

WHEN THEY WERE working with the bees they worked in silence. That was how Janet thought of it, though in fact Mrs Hutchence kept up a continuous slow talk — it was the only time she did — which was not meant to tell you things — that was all by-the-way — or to do anything at all in fact but be a soothing noise in which the bees, Mrs Hutchence herself, and she as Mrs Hutchence’s helper, were gathered in a single breath into an activity that required this overriding soft babble to contain and settle them.

Mrs Hutchence would have been surprised if you had told her: ‘That was a funny story — the one about the Chinese pirate.’ She would have denied she had ever told it, and wonder, perhaps, how it had got across from her head, since the event or the memory of it might indeed have been hanging about there, into yours. When she was silent she often thought she had said something — it could cause difficulties that, Leona certainly thought so — but when she had said something she was, as often as not, unaware of it.

This business with the bees was like no other. Something in you slept while you were at it and you woke refreshed, which was just why Janet loved it and why the bees, now, were a necessity to her, as if without them she could never enter into her own thoughts. She felt too that Mrs Hutchence was her first and would always be her greatest friend.

The old woman had a strange effect on her. Under her influence the world slowed to a pace she could manage at last: by which she meant that she had time to see things, to let them enter her and reveal what they were. It was a beautiful effect, this. Without it she did not know how she would ever have discovered certain things or believed they existed.

They had come to Mrs Hutchence through Gemmy, who had been called to make hives for her, and since he knew about these things, had once or twice gone into the bush and found swarms of the little stingless native bees she kept along with her imported ones.

The first time they went to visit her Janet had been carrying a present her mother had sent: a bowl of mutton jelly with a sealing of solid fat, and to keep the flies off, a crochet cover weighted with beads. With Meg trailing behind and the bowl held in both hands before her, she had walked slowly down the long road out of town, found the house, which they both marvelled at, mounted the stairs to the verandah, called into the still, dark interior, and when they got no reply, set off downhill towards the gully and its hives.

They saw Mrs Hutchence from far off, looking unfamiliar in a bonnet and veil, with her skirts hiked up and her big boots flopping. Billowy clouds of smoke issued from her sleeves so that she herself was shadowy, and the bees, where they passed through the slanty sun-shafts, were dazzling sparks.