10

Returned to my room I sat at my desk and, almost for comfort, and certainly to disperse the pungency of Edward Bonney’s appetite for men, I sought Maurice McArden’s manuscript.

At regular intervals, I would ask Aunt Livinia to read me the obituaries yet again, but always when Uncle Eustace was away. I felt a soft, warm excitement as I listened to the solemn words tolling like a bell over my parents’ intact love and shattered bodies. ‘Britain has lost a splendid landscapist and future member of the Academy . . . Her eye for the sea enabled us to see that universal medium of the globe in a fresh, feminine light . . . Amongst his esteemed subjects were Lord Melbourne and Lady Ermenegilda Yeats . . . Amongst her more popular portraits one must number her depiction of Bishop Grice and her rendering of Charlie Brinstead the jockey . . . But her expansive canvasses of the Essex marshes, first exhibited at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists, enchanted as many visitors as did her paintings of the Alps exhibited at the Dudley . . .’ I heard the august language not as a construction of polite grammar but as a warm pulse in my blood, which went with the feeling that derived from leaning on my young aunt’s stomach or thighs or breasts. I was delighted to believe that the obituaries served some purpose of warmth and broad consolation to her as well. She needed a form of consolation, I believed, because her warm blood was called upon somehow by my uncle to console his old, cold blood.

During a dull Thursday morning in autumn, when Uncle Eustace was supposedly attending a meeting of the Biblical Translation Committee in Lambeth, I was at home in Marylebone with Aunt Livinia reading pleasantly along in the rhythms of a eulogy, when the door to her day room swung open. Uncle Eustace’s man, Guilfoyle, appeared in the doorway, but he stepped back instantly to reveal Uncle Eustace himself. Wearing a stricken, piteously extended mouth and an equally piteous gaze, his face was a terrible thing to behold. I have not used the wrong adjective. It was as if what he beheld put him in danger of fainting. He was not an angry god this time. He was a god easily hurt and thus in many ways harder to dismiss. In trying to stand to reassure this suffering and bewildered man, I slid not to my feet but on my back on the mat beneath the ottoman where Aunt Livinia and I had been reading the obituaries. Guilfoyle had none of the delicacy of Uncle Eustace’s appearance. He came clumping across the floor, bent over and grabbed my jacket lapels with two hands and raised me to my feet.

‘Don’t harm him,’ cried Uncle Eustace in his distress. ‘He is the bruisèd reed and the smoking flax. Do not break the child!’

‘But he’s a filthy little sod, sir,’ Guilfoyle complained, ‘and merits beating.’

‘For Christ’s own sake,’ screamed Uncle Eustace, ‘let go of him, and get out!’

After Guilfoyle obeyed, Uncle Eustace approached Aunt Livinia and said, in a voice choking with disappointment that made my face blaze, ‘Compose yourself, wife. Arrange your dress properly. And rise.’

Aunt Livinia gathered the obituaries scattered about the sofa and floor and reordered not only her dress but her hair. While she was applying herself to all this, my uncle turned sideways.

‘To your room, sir! I will order Guilfoyle to lock you in while I decide how to dispose of you.’

I wondered from his new harsher tone how he had so quickly disposed of ‘bruisèd reeds and smoking flax’.

Within a day, very hungry and accompanied by Guilfoyle, whose bearing implied that at any second he would forget my uncle’s Christian prohibition and beat the tripe out of me, I was sent to a cheap school in Lewes, where I was boarded for two years, including during holidays. I spent most of each Christmas Day alone until evening, when the headmaster, Mr Pounder, invited me to Christmas dinner with his wife, one resentful son and four generous but uninterested daughters. I felt I had been and was being punished for a relatively innocent infatuation. I had done nothing but succumb to an enchantment that, when heroes in novels suffered from it, was treated by famous authors as meritorious. I could not reconcile my guilt towards my uncle and aunt with the warm effusions of great men for women characters in works of art, and so I began to question those effusions.

Let me begin with Thackeray and his Henry Esmond, the latter an unfortunate Jacobite, a Catholic and supporter of the Stuarts, but no more immune than any other man to the delusions and mad enthusiasms of love. Thackeray writes of Esmond’s feelings for Beatrix: ‘And so it is – a pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and inflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightaway dim to him; and he so prizes them he would give all his life to possess ’em.’

He goes further than others, does Mr Thackeray. He dares mention ‘hunger’. He dares mention ‘desire’. He dares mention ‘inflame’. These are more appropriate than the descriptions of any other of the novelists of our day. But having let these three vivid verbs out of their cage, he quickly retrieves them and locks them away.

Charles Dickens’ account of David Copperfield’s reaction on encountering Dora, the childlike – or is it childish? – daughter of Mr Spenlow: ‘She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was . . . I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her . . . What a form she had, what a face she had, what a graceful, variable, enchanting manner!’

More prosaic, more predictable, is Bulwer-Lytton in the unforgettable (yet not for the evocation of love) The Last Days of Pompeii, in which Clodius describes Ione, the dancer, as having ‘the soul of Vestal with the girdle of Venus . . .’ At one point Glaucus’s reaction to seeing her is rendered thus: ‘that bright, that nymph-like beauty, which for months had shone down upon the waters of his memory’.

I could multiply examples. I knew from my experience with Aunt Livinia that the presence of a lovely woman is an ineffable experience for a man, but that it must then be somehow approximately described in tired language and half-truths – goddess, nymph-like beauty, fairy, sylph, angel – words which fail to penetrate the mystery of human woman, and which actually evade it.

What a fine writer Maurice was, I thought, in my first ever literary conclusion. I did not have the right to make that judgement, but for reasons I could not say the story enchanted me.

One great writer had told the utter truth, and cut through the mesh of tired affirmations and affectations. William Blake asked the crucial questions and answered them without prose or cliché:

‘What is it men in women do require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire./ What is it women do in men require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire.’

That is, to observe gratified desire in each other’s faces, and indeed, in each other’s bodies. On reading that, I knew at once it was the sacred, innocent truth. That was what Guilfoyle had chosen to punish in me. He could see in my face the traces of Aunt Livinia’s desire for closeness. And the answer came that in all Guilfoyle’s exchanges with women he had not experienced that, that he had been a brute and was possibly incapable of seeing the said lineaments. So, as a means of reclaiming the limbs and form and body of Aunt Livinia for the cold blood and cold grasp of Uncle Eustace, he wished to punish me for having displayed even an echo of the aforesaid lineaments in my childish face.

After two years in Manchester, I received a letter from Uncle Eustace’s younger and more secular brother Amos Fremmel. He and his wife, my education now being considered finished, were willing to welcome me to a remote part of New South Wales and give me employment in his business there.

I was willing to sign on to this eviction amongst unimaginable people in an unimaginable place, though I knew that as surely as Britannia ever sent a convict to Australia, my Uncle Eustace was consigning me to the Antipodean depths for the sake of his cold grip on Aunt Livinia.

And to the grand masters of the world of prose, I would say as Blake’s spiritual child that we cannot venerate what we do not perceive. We can venerate only that which is declared in its fullness and without deception, the full woman revealed in spirit and flesh, removed from vagueness and the vulgar, from childish speculation over which infantile diminutives are pasted to represent the full mystery and holiness, and from the soothing but finally worthless imagery of even the best of writers.

Over the following days I carried Maurice McArden’s half-perceived but high truths in my head, combined with a residue of resentment of him for questioning the limits of my guvnor’s genius.

Finally the day arrived for the great trial cricket match in the vast home pasture of Momba. When I emerged from the homestead, I saw a crowd of Paakantji people standing on either side of a pitched tent on the homestead boundary, where men could pad up before batting, and ginger beer was kept cool in stone jars. Approaching the tent, I saw several sturdy-looking, bearded Paakantji men standing in lines behind chairs placed there for players. One held a hardwood club, and two others short spears with broad blades. No one present seemed to feel these weapons were held with any warlike intention – it was merely a case of tradesmen hunters absent-mindedly bringing their tools with them on the chance of meeting some small, sweet-meated marsupial. The women sat in front of them, in full gowns. One old lady wore a widow’s cap of gypsum. Babies in shirts but bare-bottomed were scattered amongst the women.

Within a quite vast perimeter of home pasture marked out with flags, the day’s eighteen-men-a-side game was to be played. I knew Fred had considerable command of what was to happen, and of who should be in which team. He’d told me that one team would bat for three hours or until all of them were out, and then the other team would take up the chase of runs.

Before play began, Fred said to the participants, ‘You had better give us your best, since the team will be chosen entirely on the day’s performance.’

Not far from Fred sat Edward Bonney, who was to be scorer and match referee. Seeing him, I was pleased to admit to myself, in my mood of expectation, that he had been an exemplary fellow since his strange assault on me. The two white women of the settlement were there to watch the match – Mrs Gavan, a drover’s wife and Mrs Larkin, Tom’s recently arrived Welsh wife. Looking at her at closer range, I saw she had a round, comfortable face with striking dark eyes, a pert, neat nose, strong features and lustrous black hair.

My team fielded first and I soon found out what a distance it was to chase a ball hit for four on that ground. It was in that sense like cricket in heaven, in which you hit a celestial four and then ran and ran till the ball was found, though here, you were credited only with four. There were a few surprises. Dandy was a poor cricketer, but his hut-mate Staples was a hypnotically deceptive slow and deadly mystery bowler. That is, he bowled a ball which would break in an unexpected direction on Momba’s hard earth. Who would have guessed he had the talent, except that cricket was a game of who would have guessed?

Yandi watched the sport like a dissenting schoolboy, but when invited to bowl he had a ferocious round-arm action. Larkin was, as I’d hoped, a wide-shouldered striker of the ball, his newly betrothed witnessing his success

I heard the bearded boundary rider, Sydney Keogh, with whom Staples was to share a hut that night, tell him, ‘No bloody talking to God tonight, Soldier. Let poor bloody God have a rest. D’you reckon you could do that?’

This strange and profanely reverent idea, that God might need a recess from his children, tickled my imagination. I was delighted that Staples’ friends could address his tendency to talk to the Deity openly, the way other Israelites might have mentioned Him to Moses.

In any case, when not fielding, Staples continued to show his wonderful tricks of bowling the ball out of the back of his hand and making it head in unexpected directions on the leg side. He bowled four men out and caused four more to nudge the ball to the wicketkeeper and the catchers in the slips close in. His experience of the divine had not harmed his clever and cunning bowling at all. And each time he took a wicket, the man who spoke to God looked pensive and tenderly touched the site of his old wound.

The Paakantji bowled round-arm, and ferociously, standing still at the stumps and aiming their thunderbolts at the batsmen-targets, who dealt with these deliveries with various levels of skill and evasion, sometimes simply avoiding their wickets and being called out. The natives loved nothing like a ball flattening a wicket, particularly if it was one of their own whose wicket was so flattened. If a Paakantji clean-bowled a fellow Paakantji, the hilarity was prodigious. But they liked Staples’ magic too, as did I.

At lunch Fred suggested that Larkin and I take the more fierce and accurate bowlers and give them training in the new and modern orthodoxy of overarm bowling, which we did.

After we returned to the field it was my team’s turn to bat. Initially, the opposition bowlers sent down mad, wild, wide balls and the drovers and Paakantji batsmen on our side made wild swings, launching the ball into the sky if they connected with it but incapable of guarding their wicket with a straight bat. The essential skills of blocking and nudging were just not in their repertoire, nor was the late cut or the full-bladed drive into the covers. Luckily for the batsmen on both sides, the fielding was agricultural. By the time it was my turn to bat, the bowlers had improved their line and length. I was anxious to show at least the form I’d had with the Higham XI in Kent, and did my best to demonstrate a range of artful shots, making a respectable thirty-seven runs before I was caught at mid-on by Tom Larkin.