Panatellas
Jenna held up the little piece of serpentine stone.
'Is it exotic enough, do you
think? You know how your mother hates souveniry things, tea towels
and that.' She lifted the stone into the light, examining the
pitted surface closely as if it were a rare gem.
'Magnesium hydrated silicate,'
Russell said. 'It doesn't look much in its natural state. It has
to be polished to bring out all those delicate greens and greys
and the intricate patterns.'
'Yes I can see.'
Finding presents for his
mother was always a problem. She loved the exotic but something as
amorphous as a piece of stone had to have more immediate
associations. He remembered, too late, a cousin returning from
America with a piece of stone picked up while visiting the Grand
Canyon. 'What is it?' his mother had asked. (She could be very
brusque when confronted with something she didn't understand.)
'It's a stone, auntie. From
the Grand Canyon.'
'Yes, but what's it to
me?'
'I brought it back for you.
It's yours, a stone from the Grand Canyon.'
'But I haven't been to the
Grand Canyon,' Russell's mother insisted rudely. 'What's it to me?'
Jenna smiled when he reminded
her. She wasn't too concerned. She and Rachel, his mother, had
always got on, though they were not particularly close. They never
phoned each other just to chat; that wasn't their style.
They fell out just once, to
Russell's knowledge, when Adrian was born. It was over something
stupid and soon forgotten. His mother was not fond of children,
certainly not small children. She probably neglected him as a
child, Russell thought, though he had no memory of it. She
insisted Jenna call her by her first name from the day she and
Russell were married. Russell came to call her Rachel too, in
Jenna's presence, and sometimes, unthinkingly, in his mother's as
well. She would look at him, slightly bemused, watching him
colour. He excused himself once, telling her, 'It's a convention -
Mother, like your tea afternoons.'
He often joked about Rachel's
tea afternoons.
This was a convention unknown
in his father's time. During the week she invited her cronies from
the golf club or people from the various Boards and committees on
which she regularly sat. Saturday was always open day but Sundays
were reserved for family and more intimate friends. Rachel had
many close friends, of both sexes, so neither Jenna nor Russell
were prevailed upon too often.
Tea afternoons would not have suited his father. He was a solitary
figure. His inquiries into the family history were conducted with
an almost clinical detachment; he wasn't emotionally involved at
all. He told Russell once, only half-jokingly, 'I like my
relatives dead. They're easier to handle up here.' He gave his
forehead a solemn tap.
All his life he avoided close
contact with people he didn't know very well. Even when Russell
was small he could remember his father writing long letters to
people he'd never met. For years he kept up a lively
correspondence with the widow of an old school mate who had gone
to live in Victoria after the war. The Easter before his death she
came to visit and the two of them hardly exchanged a word.
Surprisingly, he had wanted to
buy a milk bar once. Rachel talked him out of it. It was years
ago, not long after they were married. Russell was too young to
remember but one afternoon when he was about eleven or twelve his
father took him for a walk along one of the quieter streets away
from the city centre and showed him the shop. Russell didn't say
much. He couldn't picture his father selling lollies and
cigarettes and Sunday papers.
When his father spoke there
was a note of regret to his voice, but he wasn't really sorry.
'Your mother knew me better than I knew myself then,' he said,
laughing a little. Russell always felt he held it against her, all
the same, her failure to encourage and support him when he was
still young enough to want to take risks.
* * *
Jenna pushed the bedroom door shut behind her. She leaned
against the jamb and folded her arms. The night was so still he
could hear the sound of Mr Kedgwick's television set at the top of
the lane. Russell's thoughts had half turned from his reading to
flickering pictures of the weekend riots and their aftermath.
'What are you doing?' Jenna
asked.
'Reading the letters Godfrey
gave me.'
'Come downstairs. The fire's
burning nicely.'
'I'm not cold.'
William's writing was small ( a feminine hand, Godfrey had called
it) and not easy to read, though the letters themselves were in
remarkably good condition. There were fifteen in all, written to
his younger brother Marcus between June 1864 and March 1869, the
year Marcus died, apparently of TB. Godfrey said there must have
been earlier letters but they had not survived.
Setting them out on the bed,
Russell had put aside nine that were of particular interest, nine
that touched on a curious incident. Interestingly, reading the
letters earlier, Jenna hadn't found the incident curious at all,
simply rather sad. She thought William sounded dull and
self-righteous, but for his time, not a bad man.
Inevitably they had
argued.
'What's a "bad" man?' Russell
asked heatedly. 'What's a "good" man? Why must you reduce
everything to simple terms?'
She laughed. 'You're
exaggerating.'
'You're like a kid with a
paint brush,' he said, blundering on. 'This is red, this is blue,
this is green. All primary colours.'
Jenna became angry and
distressed. 'Children see things as they are,' she cried.
(...they had taken a black into their care, a handsome gin of some
eighteen to twenty years. She was uncommonly tall, head and
shoulders above Arabella, and never spoke a word. The poor soul
was in a deep state of mortification. She was one of a party of
blacks - twenty or thirty or so - slaughtered the previous month
by some men under the command of a neighbour of theirs, a man
called Gunn. This man Gunn was a volatile fellow. He was likeable
enough when his temper was in check, and by all accounts an
exceedingly good manager of his selection, but not a man to cross.
The party of blacks was not known to them. The Aboriginals of
those parts lived mainly on fish and honey and were mild and
peaceable. Gunn thought this other group came from the back
country looking for easy game. They were well armed with spears
and boomerangs, and resisted all Gunn's attempts to move them on.
To his credit, Gunn showed uncommon restraint, and only gave the
order to attack after one of his men was struck by a boomerang. It
was a most distressing sight. The blacks had camped on the river
about a mile up from Coggan's punt. For all their war-like manner,
they were no match for Gunn's well-armed posse. The slaughter was
almost complete. Those that did not fall on the bank were shot in
their escape across the river. One or two may have reached the
other side. The gin was found hiding in the reeds, shivering with
fright. He had to intervene to stop one of Gunn's men from
crushing her skull with the butt of his musket. They were mad men,
some of them, when they got the smell of blood, particularly the
blood of a native. It was a sport to them, like the killing of
game. Gunn was not pleased at his intervention. There followed
some discussion as to the fate of the gin, and then Gunn said, she
is your prize, Dyson, you take her. He thought it was made as a
joke, but there was no laugh when he agreed. He thought, with
proper instruction, something might be made of her. She was
able-bodied, and Arabella was in need of help now that she had the
new child, though whether this lanky gin would prove a good
capture it was too soon to say. She pined, naturally enough, for
her slaughtered family. It had been but a fortnight since...)
He heard Jenna move away from the door a little and then hesitate.
He wasn't sure if she was looking at him or at the papers
scattered across the bed. He glanced up.
'Is something the matter?'
'No. Should there be?'
'That's a classic defensive
posture, standing with your arms folded across your chest like
that.'
'Is it?' she said. 'Perhaps
I'm just feeling the cold.'
'Well go downstairs.'
(...the gin was coming along nicely. Some wag had called her Polly
Longstockings, for her great height - uncommon in an Aboriginal -
and the name had stuck. He thought she was quite devoted to
Arabella, though it was difficult to say what she truly felt as
she had not uttered a word since the day he had brought her home.
The slaughter of her family must have weighed heavy on her. She
understood well enough what they said to her, so she had mixed
with whites before. She could mend and sew now, thanks to
Arabella's patient instruction, and could wash up the plates and
glasses without breaking any. Whether she would ever speak was a
matter of some conjecture. She may have talked in her own tongue
with her own people, but Dr Mowbray thought it unlikely she would
ever speak the English language with them, no matter how well she
might understand it. William deferred, of course, to the doctor's
professional opinion, though he did believe that the passage of
time, and the unending kindness they had shown her would, in due
course, draw her out. It was unfortunate that Gunn would insist on
calling on them when he was their side of the river. William did
not like the man, and the poor girl became terrified at the sight
of him, and immediately hid herself under her bed where she stayed
for hours if necessary, shivering with fear, and would not come
out until twenty or thirty minutes after the man had gone...)
* * *
His father's study was a small bedroom at the back of the
house. Russell was an only child and the room had been the study
for as long as he could remember. When he was small it was always
called the den, later the Turk's Retreat (he never understood the
significance of this), briefly Hal's hideaway, and for a short
while during the late seventies after Rachel gave up smoking, the
Stinkhole.
Hal - his father - smoked
short panatella cigars. Russell could smell them whenever he
entered the room after a long absence: it was as if, even now
after six years, a residue of tobacco smoke lingered in the spines
of the books, the curtains, the plump cushions on the sofa. Behind
the desk there was a weathered sash window which faced north east.
During the short winter months it caught the pale morning sun. The
room was largely as Hal had left it, Rachel using it occasionally
to write up her accounts. Russell could never enter without a
forbidding sense of trespass, half expecting to see his father
bent over his desk, a panatella smouldering between his
fingers.
He told Rachel once about the
sensations the study aroused in him. She was scornful, angry even:
it must be his imagination, she said, she aired the room daily. He
shrugged it off, agreed it was the memory's tricks, the
association of familiar objects. He couldn't understand her tone
of resentment. The next time he visited, he closed the door behind
him, and took a slow, deep breath. The study smelt of beeswax and
some pine-scented air freshener. There were new curtains at the
window, photographs had come down, a loose sheet thrown over the
sofa. Rachel had been exorcising ghosts.
Sitting himself at his
father's desk, he always paused for a moment. He could usually
hear from the far end of the house the low continuous murmur of
voices. Despite Rachel's crude intrusion, his father's presence
was still strong. There were, after all, other artefacts; his
books, the two antiquarian prints of North Coast logging camps,
the desk itself...
The desk was rather large for
the room. It had come from an auction saleroom more than thirty
years ago. The timber was dark with age, the drawers stuck in damp
weather and two of the handles were missing. Russell could still
remember Hal's particular knack of opening those handleless
drawers. He called it the tickle, a little display developed to
amuse his son when he was small. It consisted of a series of rapid
taps and scratches which seemed to entice the drawer to move of
its own volition.
In his father's absence
Russell's less theatrical method was to slip a steel letter opener
under the front panel and prise the drawer forward. During the
humid summer months the drawers responded to neither ritual
coaxing nor force. Needless to say, Hal rarely kept anything of
importance in them; a few insignificant photographs, old newspaper
clippings and discarded notebooks, as Russell recalled. And there
was a monograph written some years before his death, a brief life
of his great-grandfather, William Dyson.
(...Marcus was right about the natives, they were not to be relied
upon, but then they could not be expected to see the world the way
we did. What was proper social behaviour in the civilised world
was to them quite comical. Conversely, of course, their own
conventions would appear to a civilised man beyond the pale.
Though they treated their children kindly, infanticide, he was
informed, was not uncommon. Gunn told of a woman from the
Bandjalang tribe thereabouts, upon being asked, a day or two after
the birth of her baby, where the child was, replied with perfect
nonchalance that the dog had eaten it. The gins fared little
better themselves, frequently beaten, often to within an inch of
their lives. They were not allowed even to eat, but at their
husband's pleasure, and then only to feed on whatever miserable
morsel he might throw at them. So he had been told, at any rate.
It would have been interesting to learn something authentic of
their existence from their own Polly Longstockings, but she
remained doggedly mute. She had been with them close on twelve
months now, and he feared she was not turning out as they might
have expected. She was no trouble, and she went about the tasks to
which she had been set without complaint, but for all the
kindnesses they had shown her, feeding her, clothing her, having
the doctor attend her occasional ailments, for all this, the great
concern they had taken in her general well-being, she displayed
not an ounce of gratitude. Perhaps she preferred being beaten
daily by one of the black warriors cut down by Gunn's men on the
river the previous year. Did that sound uncharitable? He supposed
he was too easily disappointed. Arabella said it was a sign of
Polly's contentment that she stayed. It was no matter that she
could not put those feelings of obligation into words. Perhaps she
was right, but who would know? The girl was unknown to them. If
they praised her, or scolded her, the response was the same: a
look that his old Master at Gloucester Road would call Dumb
Insolence, and thrash him for it instantly. Dr Mowbray, who had
observed the girl at some length, thought her mind had gone. He
reminded William that they had killed, in all likelihood, her
husband, her children possibly, her father, her mother, and the
Lord knew what other cousins and sundry relations. And he should
ask for gratitude? You impute it was to salve my conscience
that I took this poor orphan into my Christian care. This was
too severe. In any case, when he saw that long melancholy face, he
suspected the greater charity would have been to leave her in the
reeds and let that wretched man of Gunn's finish his unholy
task...)
He had forgotten about Hal's carefully written monograph. He
wondered if it had survived Rachel's ruthless clear-out after his
father's death. He could remember boxes of the stuff - files,
notebooks, his voluminous correspondence stretching back thirty
years - waiting to be fed into the incinerator.
It was a still autumn
afternoon, a month or so after the funeral. It might have been
midweek, Rachel wasn't expecting him. As he came round the side of
the house he hardly recognised her; boots, gardening trousers, one
of Hal's old sweaters. Her face was flushed, her hair flecked with
ash from the incinerator.
She saw the look on his face
but was unrepentant. 'It's just junk,' she argued. 'What am I
supposed to do with it?' He didn't interfere. Rachel had never
shared Hal's interest in genealogy; she had no family links with
the region. Her parents were Anglo-Irish and had settled
originally in South Australia in the early twenties.
Later he discovered she had
kept some pieces, genealogical tables, a few neatly typed notes
that had been clipped into a spring folder. He thought she may
have wanted them as a keepsake, a memento of the work that had
consumed Hal's interest for half a lifetime. In the event she gave
the material to the local Historical Society. She showed Russell a
newsletter in which 'Mrs Rachel Dyson's donation of her late
husband's memoirs and family records' was gratefully
acknowledged.
He didn't ask about the
monograph at the time. He didn't even think about it, so long had
it been since Hal had shown it to him.
Reading William's letters made him think of it anew. Through Hal's
eyes William had appeared almost painfully Victorian: God-fearing,
a little pompous, and with a great talent for making money. The
man inside the man was absent.
When Russell told Godfrey how
interested his father would have been in his ancestor's letters,
his cousin sighed regretfully. They had belonged to his mother and
had only come into his hands after her death a year ago. She was
ninety, quite lucid and still fending for herself, but reclusive.
She had known Godfrey was corresponding with a distant relative in
Australia, but had never mentioned the letters. William's brother
Marcus was her great-grandfather.
Godfrey brought out a
photograph of her taken when she was in her sixties. Three
generations, once removed, had weakened the bloodline, but there
was no mistaking the resemblance. Russell looked at the eyes with
the hooded lids, the sullen mouth, the little ball of flesh that
tipped the nose, and saw Hal.
* * *
'Why are you only reading certain bits?'
He had forgotten Jenna. She
had been so quiet while he was reading he had quite forgotten she
was still in the room. She had come up behind him, resting her
hands lightly on his shoulders. He could feel her breath in his
hair.
'I'm reading about the girl,'
he said. As he leaned back, she slipped her arms around his neck.
There was a faint smell of dishwashing liquid.
'What about the girl?' she
asked.
'She's interesting. I can't
help wondering what Hal would have made of her.'
'Not much,' Jenna said
distantly.
He tried to look at her. He
had to twist his head around, she had her arms so tightly about
his neck. 'Why do you say that?'
'Because Hal would've
sympathised with William's position.'
'Don't you?'
'Not particularly.'
'Why not?' he asked. 'Okay, so
he's patronising and has an unfortunate turn of phrase, but taken
in context -'
'In or out of context, it
makes no difference.'
She withdrew a little,
releasing him from her embrace. He reached across the bed. 'Let me
read to you from one of his letters.'
'Why? That won't change
anything.'
'It might,' he said. 'It could
be it's your reading of William's letters that's
unsympathetic.'
Jenna was silent. A sigh, a
murmur of protest might have been the wind rising again. The
sounds of this faraway coast were still strange to them.
He searched through the next
letter in his select pile. It was dated September 1866. He began
reading.
'Our gin has left us, that
gangling Polly Longstockings...'
(...it was not unexpected. They had begun to notice a change
in her. She was less attentive to her duties, and had become
careless about her hygiene. Arabella scolded her constantly, and
gave her a flogging once, but it made no difference. He confessed
he thought the flogging a mistake, though he knew it was kindly
meant. The rod was an excellent tool of correction in most cases,
but they had to be mindful of the circumstances that brought poor
Polly to them. A day or two after the flogging she disappeared,
went 'walk about', as the natives said, and did not return for a
week. She was dirty and dishevelled, but otherwise seemed no worse
for her adventure. They could only speculate about the course of
her wanderings. He prayed she had not fallen in with some of the
miners or timber-getters thereabouts, for she would have been
treated rudely. On her return they were careful to give no sense
of their displeasure at her thoughtlessness lest she think herself
unwanted. Nevertheless, it was only a week or so before she took
herself off on a second 'walk about', again returning after an
absence of six or seven days. They were less pleased to see her
back this time as she had become quite idle, and, dare he say it,
almost contemptuous of their concern for her. She had taken to
squatting in the dirt in the lower paddock, contemplating some
savage inner world that seemed to have absorbed her utterly. If
she were approached or spoken to she would lift her head and let
out a low rolling chuckle which she would then keep up almost
without pause until she were left alone again. It was the nearest
to speech they ever got from her, though it was speech more likely
heard from a lunatic in the asylum than from any human being,
however uncivilised. Arabella had turned quite afraid of her. And
now she had left again, and not returned. Mowbray was of the
opinion she had gone for good, returned to her tribe, or what
remnants of her tribe that were still located in those parts.
Mowbray likened these people to those birds and animals that have
an instinct for finding their way home from foreign parts, a
notion William found somewhat fanciful...)
Russell returned the letter carefully to its envelope and put it
with the others. Jenna was standing quietly behind him, near the
window. She had her head down, her arms were folded tightly across
her chest again. He noticed she was rocking slowly backwards and
forwards. He could hear her weeping.
'For God's sake,' he said
softly.
She didn't look up. 'I can't
help it. It just came over me.'
He turned away. Leaning across
the bed, he drew the next of William's letters from his selection.
There had been one before which made no mention of 'that gangling
Polly Longstockings'. Russell wondered if Marcus had been curious
for further news of her. It came in a letter written the following
June.
The Lizard | Panatellas | A View of the Mechanics
Institute | Disinterested Bystanders | The Finding of Solitude | Unfinished Business | Table of Contents