Richard Flanagan - Wanting

She was given a wombat and a horse as consolation, and life rolled on. They picnicked, played Aunt Sally, and over Lady Jane’s objection that it was irredeemably middle class, Sir John taught Mathinna cribbage rather than Lady Jane’s preference, calabresella, a game for three, which she said was popular with the clergy of the Latin peninsula. He countered that if he were to teach a game it would be English.

But the game’s nationality was meaningless to Mathinna. She simply loved the jumping dance of the stick markers up and down the crib board, calling it the kangaroo game. Over the leaping markers were to be heard burps, laughter, sighs, sneezes, giggles, groans and squeals. In time there were discussions, opinions and observations. Then came sulks, squabbles, silences, jealousies and battles of will, for which Sir John would seek to make amends with fruit mince pies, outings and more toasted cheese.

Mathinna seemed to grow up at some absurdly accelerated pace; by nine he noticed her budding beneath her virginal white-silk Regency dress with its high waist and low collar. By ten there was a swelling suggestion of breasts and, with it, a changed attitude—more knowing, more devious, he felt in his more frustrated moments, and also more attractive, as if the two were somehow related, as if a new coyness and a new confidence were the same, as though the new passion for privacy and the new desire for experience were somehow one, and he determined to be an indivisible part of that oneness.

Her body—so small compared to her large head—moved with such grace, as Sir John himself noted, like the native tiger-cat, sudden leaps and Russian ballet-like bounds, and in her physical naturalness she seemed complete, as if she were already fully formed, an adult at ten, as though there were little more life allowed her.

Lady Jane could not help it—the idea of having to travel to a ship on a damp and wave-splashed tender simply for an evening’s entertainment irritated her. For while she liked the aura of adventure, the slightest disruption to her routine was only ever a source of annoyance. And so, whenever she embarked on any of her travels to new worlds, she always insisted on taking her old world with her. That was why she had taken her forty-eight hat boxes on her celebrated journey through the heart of southwestern Van Diemen’s Land, borne aloft through its unmapped jungles on a blackwood palanquin shouldered by four barefoot convicts; and it was why she was in no particular mood to take pleasure in the elaborate costume in which her husband now appeared before her, ready for the grand costume ball on the departing Antarctic expedition ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror . For Sir John stood before her improbably dressed as a black swan.

She had found him uncommonly animated and altogether unbearable since the two ships had arrived the autumn before, en route to the southern polar regions. On the day of the ships’ berthing, Sir John had visited them and, after the obligatory ceremonies and inspections, was taken to the chart room of the Erebus , which doubled as the officers’ galley.

On a long narrow table, the furled charts, sextant, compass and battered pencil stubs, and the open bottle of his favourite drink, Madeira, awoke in him a long dormant desire to return to exploration. The two captains, Crozier and Ross, had been greatly pleased to meet the famed polar explorer, and Sir John in turn had been at once flattered and overjoyed at what he described as having his family with him—by which he meant the Royal Navy explorers, but which Lady Jane was soon to come to think was more an asylum for the socially maladroit. The three explorers had quickly struck up a seagoing camaraderie—the language, passions and boisterous midships slaps and shoves—all of which Lady Jane found excluding and exceedingly dull.

They toasted English valour and English genius, they drank to English discoveries still to come, with the unworded hope shared by all that they too might one day become part of such a glorious English history. As he drained his second glass of Madeira and soon after discovered himself on his fifth, Sir John felt unburdened. He thought of how he would love to leave the wretched colony, be rid of its poisonous politics, his wife’s intense ambitions, and once more exist in the white emptiness of the polar regions, where the choices and demands were straightforward: to explore, to chart, to survive, to return. The cold, the hunger, the deaths, the risks—all of these seemed not cause for concern or fear, but points of pride, realities that only he and a select few had met and conquered.

And Crozier!

‘Such a fine specimen of a man,’ he later told Lady Jane. ‘It is said he is the handsomest in the Royal Navy!’ Sir John did not add that such physical grandeur made him feel at once awkward, fat and clumsy in his presence, but also buoyed—more manly, taller and braver than he felt when in the company of others. ‘Many of the ladies think,’ he added, with a confidential inhalation, ‘that he takes after Byron.’

‘Only if he traded tallness for talent,’ sniffed Lady Jane, who found Crozier’s height off-putting. Though he did exude a certain dull sensuality that reminded Lady Jane of sitting next to a wet hunting dog, she could see no sign of any vice on the empty face far above. Though she would never have admitted it, she had secretly always rather envied Byron his gift for dissipation. But that was beside the point. Crozier was, once spoken to, phenomenally dull.

It had hardly thrilled her, then, when what had been intended as a provisioning and repair stop of only a few weeks had lengthened into several, and then it was apparent that winter was upon them and the wolfhound would stay with them, for the expedition chose to winter in Hobart rather than risk their lives in the long Antarctic night.

The delay delighted Sir John, however. He arranged for Ross and Crozier and their crews a series of entertainments, travels, parties and scientific projects. He personally oversaw the provedoring of their ships to ensure the expedition was not cheated in quality or quantity, took the officers shooting for emu and kangaroo, built an observatory to help them with their celestial observations, had every facility of the colony laid open for their use and benefit. Other than Mathinna, the expeditioners were his great passion.

In return for such hospitality, Ross and Crozier, before their long-delayed departure the following spring, arranged a ball to be held on the Erebus . Impressed by the wondrous animals they had seen and shot, its theme was to be the bestiary.

But Sir John, standing in front of Lady Jane in his elaborate motley of wire and feathers, mask in hand, could see that he was far more excited about this ball than his wife. He attempted to cajole her into a better humour.

‘Why, Napoleon himself had a bedhead made for Josephine out of a Van Diemonian black swan,’ he said, but even as he was saying it, he realised that she was further annoyed by the trouble he had taken with the exquisite folly of his black feathered wings. Her own costume was infinitely simpler—a simplicity she felt more appropriate to their position. She would wear a small mask of a fox’s face, which she had made for her many years before when visiting Venice.

‘I had the vanity of thinking,’ said Sir John, somewhat affronted, ‘that it might amuse you. The workmanship is exquisite.’

He had found a tailor who combined the sensitivity of a Maison Verreaux taxidermist with the craft of the finest couturier: a convict transported for bestiality—a detail the Governor thought better not to bring to his wife’s attention—who had created the dark wings in a half-opened spread, such that it seemed Sir John might at any moment take flight. The taxidermist had infused his creation not just with the delight of reaching the sky, but with an unmistakeable suggestion of pleasures that spoke more of the earth. The mighty black swan’s great wings swept forward and out, as if seeking their first purchase of air, and it made Sir John’s body—normally evocative only of ease—appear as though it were already tensing for a straightening, a moment of wondrous release.