Ian Kennedy Williams RAW CUT Call Polly Longstockings

 

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