3

I was kept occupied over the next few days. Abbot complained to me that he was falling behind in his work because I was neglecting my own. He referred to my visit to see Frere as an ‘unnecessary diversion’. He wanted to know if my day-books reflected my absences and lack of progress.

I worked late into the night. I visited the quarry and the quartermasters’ stores when there were few people present. I surveyed and recorded, and to save even more time I trusted the judgements and estimations of others, filling pages with the reckonings of both Fletcher and Cornelius. Neither man shared my urgency, though they too were constantly urged on by Abbot.

‘Tell him what he wants to hear,’ Fletcher told me.

‘Just as he tells our masters what they want to hear,’ Cornelius added. It genuinely saddened him to see how run-down our enterprise had become, how dependent it now was on almost rubber alone. He had helped control it during the years of its supremacy, and now he sometimes seemed to me like a man picking through the waste of its ruins like a dispirited child prodding a stick through weeds. We had all heard his tales of what had once happened at the place, of how extensive its influence had been, of the value and diversity of the goods which had passed through it.

Even Fletcher sat and listened when Cornelius spoke, and I sensed that he too – though he would never have confessed as much – regretted how little was now actually undertaken at the Station. Recently, there had been talk of the Belgians making yet another bid to end our concessionary status and to buy up our sheds and wharves to expand their own considerably more profitable enterprise. But they would neither confirm nor deny this when we approached them directly; there was a great deal to be gained by them in maintaining this uncertainty.

‘Does anyone ever see Abbot’s reports?’ Cornelius asked.

Fletcher and I exchanged a glance and shook our heads.

‘He sends them monthly,’ I said. ‘Sealed canisters.’

‘Where?’

‘First to Leopoldville, then onwards to London, I suppose.’

‘Reports about what?’

‘About our work here. Profit and loss. What we achieve and what we fail to achieve. Viability. Prospects for the future. Who knows?’

‘Reports on each and every one of us,’ Fletcher added.

I told him I didn’t fully understand him.

‘I’ve known what Abbot was doing ever since he arrived,’ Cornelius said. ‘I’ve seen a succession of Abbots. Men who come here only to be disappointed – for whatever reason; take your pick – but men who will never admit their disappointments, men who go on building things up, surrounding themselves with adventure and achievement where nothing can be either verified or questioned at such a distance.’

‘You think he makes the Station a more viable prospect than it is?’ I asked him.

‘Look around you,’ Cornelius said.

‘We still trade at a good profit,’ I insisted.

I knew by the silence which followed that neither man was willing to be drawn into revealing their own uncertain hopes for the future of the place.

‘For all we know,’ Cornelius said, ‘the decision to sell or abandon might already have been taken and the letter despatched. How would we know? For six months we would all go on doing what we do like clockwork toys slowly winding down and walking round and round in ever decreasing circles banging ever more weakly on our small tin drums.’

Fletcher laughed at this. ‘Don’t look so concerned,’ he told me. ‘He’s been saying the same thing for the past twenty years.’ Fletcher had been at the Station only twelve years.

‘Perhaps,’ Cornelius said.

‘But we all have contracts,’ I said.

‘Even Abbot,’ Fletcher said. ‘Even Abbot.’

A moment later we were distracted by the ringing of the bell used to signal the approach of a vessel to our wharves.

‘Is anything expected?’ Cornelius asked Fletcher.

Fletcher shrugged.

We rose together and went outside. It was late afternoon and the bulk of the day’s business was over. The four vessels moored at our jetties were empty. Steam and smoke rose from the single boat preparing to leave. The crews of the others lay asleep around their decks and in the shade of their awnings.

The man ringing the bell ran towards us. Few others paid him any attention. He was a man proud of his position as our human alarm and sat in silence for days on end scanning the empty river. He grabbed Fletcher’s arm and indicated where half a dozen small boats negotiated the upriver current on their way across to us. Fletcher studied these through his glasses.

‘Ivory,’ he said.

Cornelius snorted his disappointment at this. ‘Anything else?’

Fletcher continued looking. ‘Hard to say.’

The boats approached closer. Even without binoculars I could see that their loads did not amount to much.

‘I have work to do,’ Cornelius said, and left us. Several years earlier he had submitted a report to the Company recommending they abandon the ivory trade, and to concentrate instead on the gathering of valuable timbers – teak, bomba, mahogany and ironwood – for export to Europe, and for larger scale trade in staples such as caoutchouc, palm oil, groundnuts and gum, but the profit still to be made on tusk and horn was too high to be ignored. It was not out of any thought for the slaughter of the animals which caused Cornelius to make his appeal, but the knowledge that most of the ivory was stolen from other collectors, and that small but vicious wars were still being fought to acquire it. He was convinced that any man bringing more than a dozen pieces to trade brought them with blood on his hands, and for this reason he had relinquished this part of his work to Fletcher. I was once with Cornelius at the Belgian Station when he pointed to a twenty-foot length of boxwood trunk and told me there was enough there to make a thousand clarinets.

‘Perhaps you want to go with him and keep your own hands clean,’ Fletcher said to me, his glasses still fixed on the approaching boats.

I indicated to him that I would remain, if only to stay beyond the reach of Abbot.

Then he said, ‘Amon,’ and wiped his eyes.

‘You might have guessed he’d be involved in some form or other.’

‘But only as Hammad’s whipping boy. We owe Hammad too many favours.’

‘Will his involvement push the price up?’

He considered this, but said nothing.

By then the boats were within hailing distance and Fletcher shouted to Amon. The man – whom none of us trusted – drew back his white hood and returned the greeting.

‘If he’s come with the ivory, then the chances are it’s a good load. It’s valuable and he’s come to keep his eye on it as Hammad’s agent. It’s the first we’ve had for a month.’

He waded into the water and grabbed the prow of the leading boat. Amon leaped from it and the two men embraced. I could imagine the look on Fletcher’s face as the Syrian grasped him. The remaining boats were secured.

Amon saw me and came to me. Our greetings were less effusive. I had hitherto had little to do with him and he remained mistrustful of me. He bowed and offered me a salute. I shook his hand. I was incidental to the proceedings; my presence had no bearing on the price he would be paid. He returned to Fletcher, shouting for the men on the boats to uncover the ivory.

‘Bring it ashore,’ Fletcher told him.

‘But you may not wish to buy it. We may be forced to go back across the river with it.’ Amon bowed his head as he spoke. He then called for one of the loads to be carried ashore. They were long, white tusks, most taller than the men who carried them.

‘He’s cleaned them up,’ Fletcher whispered to me. He went to inspect the tusks.

‘Nothing buried and dug up here,’ Amon said. ‘All freshly gathered. Look closely and you may even see some blood.’ This was meant as a joke, but only he laughed.

‘And the rest?’ Fletcher said.

Amon called for a single tusk from each of the other loads to be carried ashore.

Fletcher tapped them with his cane. He ran his hands along their curved lengths. He sniffed deeply at their sawn ends, or at the yellowing roots where they had been pulled whole from the slaughtered animals.

I had been present a year ago, along with Frere, when Fletcher had been called upon to kill a rogue elephant that had trampled the crops of several nearby villages. Our excursion had lasted only an hour, at the end of which Fletcher downed the animal with a shot to each of its front knees, and then by a succession of shells into its eyes as it knelt trumpeting and lashing its bloody trunk at the men who tried to approach it. The price for this had been the better of the creature’s two ten-foot tusks, both of which were extracted before it was dead. Even when the flesh and muscle of the sockets had been hacked away and the ivory extracted, the creature did not die, and sat turning its sightless head from side to side for a further hour as the blood continued to pour from its wounds. Fletcher left immediately his work was done, but I remained behind with Frere while he attempted to sever one of the creature’s feet, and as he cut off its tail and then removed foot-square pieces of its hide. I wondered aloud if there was anything we might do to put the animal out of its lingering misery, but Frere laughed at the idea.

Down at the jetty, more of the ivory was brought ashore. I was surprised at how quickly Fletcher concluded his bargaining with Amon. I saw what a game was played in their transactions and how secretly reluctant they were to conclude their business. Fletcher shouted for drink to be taken to Amon’s boatmen. Amon himself did not drink.

Scales were set up and each of the tusks weighed.

Abbot appeared and watched all this from a distance. He would be angry that he had not been called sooner to record the transaction. He called for Fletcher to go to him, but Fletcher pretended not to hear him, though most of the others turned and looked. Each tusk was weighed and the necessary calculations made. Realizing that he was being deliberately ignored, Abbot turned and walked away.

‘He’ll write it all down,’ I said to Fletcher, still not fully convinced that Abbot was the spy he and Cornelius accused him of being.

‘Your name will be in there, too,’ Fletcher said. ‘Did you not hear him calling you? Perhaps you were the one who didn’t answer him.’

*   *   *

A word about Bone. Almost thirty years ago, Bone, then a corporal, served in Hobart Town. At that time, a cousin of mine – my mother’s brother’s son – twenty-three years my senior, attempted to make his name under the auspices of the Aboriginal Protection League by studying the last of the pure-bred native people then living there. He was directed to the garrison, where he encountered Bone. The man’s name was Fairfax, my mother’s maiden name, and having spent five months in Hobart, he contracted some fever or other and died there. All his work was subsequently lost – whether never completed, whether stolen from him by the aboriginals or lost at some point along its journey home remains uncertain. No-one in the family tried particularly hard to ascertain the truth of the matter. There was some disgrace attached to the venture, but I never knew what that was. I knew vaguely of all this as a boy, but was more forcibly reconnected with the facts by Bone himself, who began to tell me the story one night not knowing that I was a distant relation of the man. I do not recollect ever meeting the scientist, except possibly as a very small child, knowing only that his line of the family had encountered some trouble following the suicide of his father and that he had gone to Australia to live beyond this shadow.

Bone, it transpired, afterwards succumbed to the same fever, but survived it. He told me about the illness, comparing his greater suffering to that of my cousin, and looked upon his survival as an achievement of his own making. A large number of the Hobart garrison had also died and been buried in unmarked graves. As a direct result of this, Bone had risen from corporal to sergeant. This, too, he regarded as being the reward of effort and ability.

Less than a year afterwards Bone was allegedly the protagonist of an incident in which two old native women had been killed. Bone’s story was that he had been attacked by a tribe of killers and that the old women were merely the unlucky victims of his fight to defend himself. The two small fingers of his left hand had been severed in the attack, the rest of his hand saved by a Government surgeon. After that, Bone was transferred, first to Sydney for five years, and then God knows where.

He was here at the Station before me, and six months passed before we discovered this connection.

Now, in these present circumstances, his behaviour towards me was becoming ever more unbearable – one moment gloating and condemning me for what had happened, the next speaking to me as though we were equals, as though we were related by blood, men who might share confidences, men who did not stand in daily contemplation of each other from the opposite sides of the abyss.