Lily King - Euphoria

We flagged down a pinnace almost as soon as we reached the Sepik proper. It was a boat full of missionaries from Glasgow who planned to sprinkle themselves and their faith all over the region. I could see their hearty confidence falter as soon as they saw us.

‘Been through the wars, have ye?’ one of them managed, but they shrunk from us as soon as we climbed on board. Nor did we give them much opportunity for conversation, though one of them bought my canoe and engine for far more than they were worth. Nell tried to persuade me not to sell, to go directly back to the Kiona. But I was determined to go with them to Sydney, and I needed the money. While Fen was up talking to the driver about getting the rest of their stuff picked up, I told her I’d go as far as New York with her if she’d let me. She shut her eyes and Fen came back to his seat beside her before she had answered.

We took rooms in Sydney at the Black Opal in George Street. Nell insisted on having her own. The clerk wrote down in his ledger Nell Stone, Andrew Bankson, Schuyler Fenwick, and it pleased me to see their names separated and to see Nell receive her own key, 319, a flight above the rooms Fen and I were given.

Without bathing, we walked to the Commonwealth Bank then down to the White Star booking office where Nell and Fen secured two passages to New York. I’d hoped they’d have to wait weeks for space on a ship, but because of the crook economy, the man in the office said, most liners were half empty. The SS Calgaric would sail in four days. The paper money they slid across the counter looked fake. An electric fan spun bland air at us, though the day was cool and Nell wore a sweater over her blouse that made her look like a girl at university. Everything felt wrong: the fan, the hard floor, the man’s combed hair and bow tie, the smells of cured leather and mint candy. I wanted my own ticket on that liner. I wanted to tear up hers and take her back to the Kiona with me.

Unable to return to the heavy walls of the Black Opal, unable to sit at a restaurant, we walked. I tried to inure myself to the noise, the foot and road traffic, the hundreds of bloated pink faces barking in Australian English, which had become a loathsome sound. Even the shop signs and billboards overwhelmed me. YOUR GAS REFRIGERATOR, MADAM, IS HERE. THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE COME IN CELLOPHANE. Nevertheless, I was compelled to read every one.

This sensation of the familiar feeling new and jarring was something I had relished when I’d returned from my first field trip. This time it felt wretched. I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed. Like them, the three of us would face no recriminations. No one would ever ask us here how we had got a man killed.

Before Fen had seen the numbers, I had chosen Room 219, the one directly below Nell’s. Next morning, when I heard her door open and shut, I dressed quickly and went down to the breakfast room. They hadn’t started serving yet and the room was empty save Nell in the corner holding a teacup with two hands as if it were a coconut gourd. I took the seat across from her. Neither of us had slept.

‘The only thing worse than being out of that room is being in that room,’ she said.

I wanted to say so much. I wanted to acknowledge with her what had happened, how we had let it happen, why we had let it happen. I wanted to tell her Fen had made it clear to me from the start that this flute was what he was after and that I had done nothing to stop him, only taken full advantage of his absence. But I wanted to say it all lying down again with her, holding her in my arms. ‘I should have gone after him straightaway, as soon as I saw the note.’

‘You couldn’t have caught up with him.’ She ran her finger along the edge of the teacup. ‘And you certainly wouldn’t have persuaded him otherwise.’ She was wearing the sweater again. She hadn’t looked up at me yet.

‘I wanted that time with you,’ I said. ‘I wanted it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.’ These last words surprised me. The truth of them made me start to shake. When she didn’t respond, I said, ‘I can’t regret that. It was perfect.’

‘Worth a man’s life?’

‘Was what worth a man’s life?’ Fen said. He’d come in a side door behind me.

‘Your flute,’ Nell said.

He frowned, as if she were a child who’d been cheeky, and told an approaching waiter to fetch him a chair. He’d bathed and shaved and smelled like the West.

Again we wandered. We walked through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We looked at the watercolors by Julian Ashton and a new exhibit of Aboriginal bark paintings. We sat at a café with tables outdoors, like in the New Yorker drawing. We ordered things we hadn’t seen in years: veal, Welsh rarebit, spaghetti. But none of us ate more than a few bites of any of it.

On the way back to the Black Opal I saw that Nell’s limp was worse.

‘It’s not my ankle,’ she said. ‘It’s these shoes I haven’t worn for two years.’

When we passed a chemist’s I stayed back and slipped inside. The girl behind the counter looked part Aboriginal, rare for a shopkeeper in Sydney then. She passed me the box without speaking.

‘I think I can pay for my wife’s plasters,’ Fen said, pushing me aside to give her the money.

At the hotel the clerk handed us a note from Claire Iynes, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney, inviting us to dinner.

‘How’d she know we were here?’ Nell said.

‘I rang her up yesterday,’ Fen said.

He wanted to tell her about the flute.

‘Dinner? How are we to go to a dinner, Fen?’

‘There’s a dress shop two doors down, miss,’ the clerk said. ‘Hair and beauty across the street. Fix you up smart.’

A cab took us up to Double Bay, where Claire and her husband lived, just above Redleaf Pool.

‘Poshy posh,’ Fen said out the window to the large houses on the water. He brought his head back in. ‘Claire has moved up in the world. What did she marry into?’

‘Mining, I think. Silver or copper,’ Nell said, the first sentences she’d uttered since we’d gotten the invitation.

Fen smirked at me. ‘Bankson doesn’t like it when the colonists talk about where money comes from.’

It wasn’t a large dinner, nine of us around a small table in what seemed to be a drawing room. The vast dining room was on the other side of the house, too big, we were told, for four couples and the English hanger-on. No one knew quite what to make of my presence. I wasn’t headed home; I wasn’t finished with my fieldwork. We hadn’t thought this through. It highlighted even for us the fact that I’d followed them all the way here with no good reason. I think I had been waiting all along for Fen to say ‘Why are you here, Bankson? Why don’t you leave us the hell alone?’ Because my only reason, the reason he knew as well as I, was that I was in love with his wife. He could have called me out anytime, and he could have done it right there with witnesses in the Iyneses’ house, but instead he said, ‘He’s been ill. Seizures. We thought he should see a doctor.’

There was a long discussion about doctors in Sydney and who would be the best for mysterious tropical diseases. Eventually Fen rerouted them with talk of our ‘breakthrough,’ he called it, our grid, and we spent most of the evening mapping out the guests and mutual acquaintances, of which there were many. One man with a great heavy moustache knew Bett from a project he’d done in Rabaul; another had read zoology with my father at Cambridge. Claire seemed to know every anthropologist we could name, and caught us up on the department gossip in three different countries.