Richard Flanagan - Wanting

‘Can they not see,’ hissed Montague to his wife, ‘that the child is the indiscretion?’

It wasn’t long before Sir John’s new interest in his adopted daughter began to affect his work. He found himself increasingly fed up with the daily tedium of executive council meetings in the morning, the endless wearying interviews with countless supplicants after lunch, the minutes to be signed, the memoranda to be dictated, the orders and inspections and enquiries—to say nothing of the social dreariness of night after night of dining with people he now found the dullest in the world, none of whom he could ever imagine having the wit or agility to catch a seagull, all of whom were determined not to reveal a single human emotion in front of the man who, for all intents and purposes, was their king. He completed his tasks, but his once implacable attention to detail was gone. He was beginning to live in two worlds, and only one mattered to him.

With Mathinna, Sir John played Aunt Sally, he rolled the walnut with the cockatoo and joined in the songs she had been taught by Francis Lazaretto. With her was possible all that wasn’t as Governor, things that were common and simple and fun, in which he could say something foolish or innocent—or, as he frequently did, both—and suffer no consequence. With the Aboriginal child he felt he could be himself.

There were other effects, though. Even he was alarmed at how he was becoming softer, more aware of the sufferings and wants of others, and this led him to several acts of compassion that were interpreted as folly and, worse, weakness. He pardoned the five convicts who had for two years cut the track over which he and Lady Jane travelled through the southwest. He sought to limit the use of the lash.

‘The man has no understanding of power,’ Montague confided to Chief Justice Pedder, as he shuffled the cards in preparation for their weekly game of piquet.

Unused to joy and seeking to justify it as duty, Sir John told himself, as he took to telling others, that this was a most singularly important experiment for the colony’s future. But not the least attractive aspect of Mathinna for Sir John was that when he was with her, he couldn’t give a fig for the experiment, the colony or its future. Secretly he delighted in what had become his life: those few stolen moments with the child, as opposed to the interminable fantasy world of colonial government, which he increasingly lived in only as a shell. Because he no longer had opinion or ambition or interest, and because his wife had all these things, he abdicated all responsibility and even took to openly asking her advice and immediately endorsing it, without either discussion or enthusiasm, while his ear was ever waiting only for the tinkling of Mathinna’s wrist.

‘Why have you allowed this?’ asked Montague, disturbed at the way the Governor now gave his enemies all the evidence they needed.

‘Why not?’ replied Sir John. And he laughed, because out of the window he could see Mathinna playing with her possum, which, with its large eyes for seeing better in its preferred night-time wanderings, wore the same look of astonished amusement as Montague at that moment.

Sir John had inherited his secretary from his predecessor, Arthur. In the troubled history of the colony, with its outbreaks of banditti and black wars, the savagery of the slavery of the convicts, the mythical stories of men who ate each other and the determination of his predecessor to hang as many men as was necessary—in order that all would understand that they could hope for anything except hope itself—Montague had played a quiet but essential role. He understood power as the dominion of necessity, not as a justification to go on en plein air watercolour painting expeditions. He despised the Franklins above all else for their naiveté.

‘Someone has to,’ continued Sir John, ‘and my wife wants to.’ And he laughed again, because he understood that Montague could not see how trivial and pointless ruling anything or anybody was. Sir John knew he was being careless, but his contempt was so complete he did not think it could be of any consequence.

‘Power is like that too,’ Chief Justice Pedder said to Montague, after the latter had recounted this story. ‘It is the kingdom of forgetting.’ He declared a retique, took sixty points and won the game.

Still, on occasion Sir John felt ashamed of himself and, as a pious man, asked God in his prayers for His guiding wisdom. He felt he was what he knew the colonists increasingly whispered: a useless fat old man infatuated with a piccaninny. He tried to focus his thoughts on anything but the Aboriginal child. But only the memory of her laugh and easy movements restored in him any sense of youth and purpose. No one more than Sir John himself was struck by the enigma that was his life. And when he met Mathinna the next morning, he told her more stories of the great polar lands, tales of endless ice and frozen worlds, while inside, his heart was scalded all over again by the most sinful desire.

‘But you can only keep power,’ Montague said to Chief Justice Pedder, laying down his cards and handing over to Pedder a proposal for several new penal reforms which Sir John had that morning announced he wished to see enacted, ‘if you forgive nothing and remember everything.’ The proposal was written in Lady Jane’s hand. And both men, who had survived the pestilential intrigues of a prison yard become a society and kept their power for a long time, read the document carefully, for both men fully intended to continue to survive and keep power for a longer time yet.

Sir John could not help it. Nor could he help himself. That smile, that laugh, that way of pulling at his arm to gain attention, tugging at his trouser leg, leaning and rolling against him as if he were a rubbing post, that way of—he shuddered with the memory. So many sensations, too many memories—all innocent, of course—but something led him to put them out of his mind. It was her touch, he thought with a shock as abrupt as the sensation of her fingers, her hand. Her body touching his.

Above all, she loved toasted cheese. Sir John would have buttered toast and toasted cheese prepared for her, and then would watch her greedy little mouth intently as the yellow fat oiled her hungry lips. Once sated, she would immediately look for her parrot with which to play—or, failing to find the bird, for Sir John to come with her, which invariably he would, faithful as a puppy, timid as a possum and certainly more tractable than a cockatoo, sometimes peeved, sometimes frustrated, but ever obedient.

Sometimes he snuck into her bedroom just to watch her sleep—so unlike Lady Jane, who seemed like an old wheezing dog in comparison with this angelic child who hardly emitted a whisper. He thrilled at seeing the dark down on her exposed forearm, and as he leant in with his candle, the better to see her, he would wish to kiss her eyes, her lips. But, terrified of his engorged heart, he would abruptly straighten and leave.

He was enchanted and, like all those enchanted, he wanted proximity to his enchantress, and he manoeuvred and manipulated to make sure he got it. If he thought there was a wrongness, even a perversity, in his growing infatuation, he gave no sign of it. Rather he advanced into it, had the whole of Government House enthuse about this marvellous experiment being conducted with such vigorous joy, implicated society by having them applaud Mathinna when she entered a room, had Hobart Town wave when she sat with him in the vice-regal carriage as they travelled through the city.

When it snowed he took her sledding on the lower slopes of the mountain where he had a passable run cleared by some convicts: how Mathinna squealed as she rode down on the sleigh he had specially built. When it shone he took her sailing on the expanse of the Derwent estuary, though this rather bored her. And when her possum went missing and she was inconsolable, he personally took toasted cheese to her rooms, and was mystified when she threw the plate at the wall. Mathinna never told him that when the animal had not returned from its nocturnal life to her bed at dawn, she had gone searching, only to find one of Montague’s kangaroo dogs cracking a skinned possum carcass between its slobbery jaws.