22

As Mrs Geraghty had promised, Alfred was up the next morning and shook my hand solemnly as he wished me the blessings of the season. His gift to me was Mr Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone.

I was relieved he wasn’t giving me the book in any expectation that I would read it instantly. ‘Just the same,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I thought it was lively enough to make a literary gent of you.’ He smiled. ‘One other thing. Chard went to a lot of trouble to track a copy down, so I’d be obliged if you thanked him for his trouble if the chance arises.’

I assured him I would. The book made me think back to how old joking Mr Collins was always asking Aunt Georgie to run away with him, and she always replied no because he would leave her alone at home to go jaunting with Mr Dickens.

Mrs Geraghty brought in fresh bread she’d baked, with boiled eggs and bacon and the eternal black tea. She then wished us the joy of the feast day, and we wished the same back, Alfred asking, ‘Will you take your Christmas dinner with fortunate Mr Clohessy today?’

‘With him and young Mr Levine,’ she confirmed.

When she’d gone Alfred told me Mrs Geraghty went to Mr Clohessy’s hut to recite the Papist rite called the Rosary and they prayed together on the veranda in full sight of others.

‘It’s quite something to see a bullocky pray,’ he said, ‘for a bullock team on a muddy trail would make a profaner out of any saint, as you no doubt know by now. Clohessy did his time and got a conditional pardon. Just like that Abel Magwitch in the guvnor’s book. The condition in the pardon being they can’t ever go back to the British Isles.’

We both laughed at the concept of our transportation.

‘You think we’ll get a conditional pardon one day, old chap?’ he added. He laughed again, but with no rancour.

‘We had a boundary rider hang himself rather than go back to England,’ I told him.

‘Yes. I heard. Very strange, wouldn’t you say? Something profound there. I mean to say, families are strange entities, but not to be able ever to face your own again . . .’

‘And they were going to make him the new baronet.’

‘Well, even so . . .’ And again he laughed. He seemed to have no pain from the night before, though he did drink a great deal of tea.

After breakfast I gave him a new briar pipe and a kangaroo-skin tobacco pouch, and we thought we’d done each other and the festival very well. Then, from nowhere, we heard someone with a fine voice begin singing outside, who Alfred said was a young Englishman who’d helped with the bonfire the night before. We went to the veranda with our cups of tea and there, in the home paddock of Corona Station, the young gentleman drover stood, his large hat in his hands, by the remnants of last night’s fire. In purest tenor, he pierced the morning with the piteous nostalgia of the song.

The holly and the ivy,

When they are both full grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood,

The holly bears the crown,

Oh, the rising of the sun,

And the running of the deer.

The playing of the merry organ,

Sweet singing in the choir . . .

Suddenly he paused, mid-verse, wavered and then walked into the shade of a river gum tree and was savagely sick.

‘Oh, poor chap,’ said Alfred, before calling out to the singing drover. ‘Hayward, when you’re well, come up and meet my brother and have some black tea.’

Though probably a year or so older than me, Hayward seemed very boyish in his discomfort as he looked up and replied, ‘Black tea seems to be the ticket for me, Mr Dickens.’

Alfred and I went back to the dining room and Hayward soon came in, saying, ‘My appetite returns.’

After making sure Hayward had washed his hands, Alfred said, ‘I have the pleasure to introduce my brother, Plorn Dickens, true name Edward, though he has rarely been called that. Plorn, I present to you Ernest Hayward.’

‘A Merry Christmas,’ I said. ‘You must’ve been the absolute joy of your choirmaster.’

‘My choirmaster could never afford the indulgence of praising me,’ he replied. ‘He was my father.’

‘Ernie is a child of the cloth and the parsonage, Plorn.’

‘I was praised by pretty girls though,’ said Ernie. ‘And in the public houses around Derby I have a repute for my version of the old song “You Ain’t Ashamed of Me, Are You, Bill?”’

‘Will you give us that at the Christmas meal perhaps?’ asked Alfred.

‘If still living, yes. If not, I demand the full honours of the Anglican rite of burial.’

‘Are you an admirer of the music hall?’ I asked.

He sang, as if by way of an answer, ‘“Tho’ some o’ your rich relations are as ’orty as can be, Don’t turn away, but kiss me, and say you ain’t ashamed o’ me.”’

Then he consumed an entire cupful of tea in one mouthful and poured himself another. When he was half finished that, he turned again to me and said, ‘Yes, I belong to that corps of music hall wastrels, Mr Dickens.’ This was followed by more singing:

I suppose she don’t remember all the cash I said I’d spend,

When I walked ’er off to ’Ampstead all the way,

I suppose she don’t remember ’ow I used to pawn ’er watch

And promise I would take ’er to the play.

‘Well,’ said Alfred, laughing, ‘I think you’re a total disgrace to the diocese of Durham and the Durham School itself.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Ernie Hayward. ‘To be a disgrace to one’s school is an honour reserved for a few privileged souls, but to be a disgrace to an entire British diocese – that demands the special endeavour of a person.’

Alfred told him to go and rest and be back at noon, which was when the Chards were coming.

As Hayward left, Alfred summoned the young Paakantji boy and asked him to draw a hessian blind on the veranda and drench it with water to temper any hot air coming through its pores.

After that we sat in easy cane furniture in the veranda shade, Alfred smoking cigarettes and talking about the breaking in of his new briar pipe.

He said, ‘I hope Kate and Mamie visit Mama today.’

I assured him they would or may have already been yesterday.

‘Good old Katie would have seen to it, of course,’ he agreed with a laugh. ‘Lucifer Box,’ he chortled, using our father’s name for fiery Kate. ‘And just as well she is a Lucifer Box, standing up to the guvnor.’

‘I wouldn’t mind dropping in to Gad’s Hill for an hour or two,’ I said, liking this version of my brother.

‘We’d be so sun-tanned they wouldn’t know who we were. And Pa would be outraged by our boots.’

I liked him calling the guvnor ‘Pa’ as well.

‘She was Lucifer Box, and Mamie was Mild Glo’ster. Tells you something, eh? Ma told me once that when Katie was five years old and they were on a tour of Italy, she got an abscess on the neck and ordered father to look after her, insisting he change all her dressings for six months. Just as well, because Mama was carrying the noble moi at the time. Katie was the one always saw through the guvnor, but they really loved each other . . . Changed all her dressings. Can you imagine? And she gave him hot mustard in return.’

I let him go on elaborating on beautiful Kate, our mediator with the august guvnor.

‘D’you remember her falling in love with Ed Yates? I think you were a baby then.’

Indeed I was, if born at all. This was exactly the sort of inside knowledge I could receive from my seven-years-older brother – what all my brothers and sisters did, indeed what other people did, before they had a Plorn in their lives.

‘Ed Yates was one of Father’s young friends. Stuck with the guvnor through a lot of thick and a deal of thin. Our beautiful Katie, she would stand there twisting a hand around a balustrade or a column or anything that presented, looking enchanted with Yates. He pretended not to notice, but Katie nearly wore the varnish off furniture, longing for him. And he was already married then, to Miss Wilkinson – but Katie saw only him, Adonis, and to hell with the wife.’

I did remember seeing the guvnor weeping and exclaiming over Katie’s wedding dress when she eventually married Charlie Collins. A nice man, who everyone said had a strange penitential streak, Charlie was nothing like his brother Wilkie. And nothing like Katie for that matter.

‘Did you know Charlie Collins has been ill the last year or so?’ I asked.

‘He always was ill,’ said Alfred, as if that was somehow an endearing trait.

‘Well, Katie got very thin and worn-down from nursing him, and then she got sick and demanded the guvnor’s presence just like you say she did when she was little, and the guvnor sat with her through the whole fever.’

‘Poor Katie,’ Alfred murmured. ‘I doubt Charlie Collins ever fulfilled the role of husband for her – you understand what I mean, Plorn?’

I didn’t know whether to nod knowingly or blush. It was easy to believe Katie hadn’t seen the features of gratified desire in the case of Charlie Collins. On top of everything else, they were poor, because he took so long to make paintings, so these days he’d taken to writing pieces in All the Year Round.

‘Did you see much of Katie’s painting before you left?’ Alfred asked.

‘I did. She does children a lot. The guvnor says if only she were a man she might be raised to the Academy one day. He says she has to be bolder, and that her husband isn’t a good example to her, leaving most of his paintings unfinished and despising the ones he does finish.’

‘But what do you think of her paintings yourself, Plorn? Not Father. Yourself.’

‘They look splendid to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how she does it. Drawing is beyond me, let alone oils.’

‘And of course no sign of a child? A little Dickens-Collins prodigy?’

‘I . . . I don’t think so.’

Alfred nodded grimly but not as if it was anyone’s fault.

The rest of the morning passed pleasantly with discussion of family members, and gossip that did not wound, to the extent that I totally forgot it was Christmas, here or anywhere else. Alfred drank nothing hard – all we had was tea as the hessian dried out and the conversation parched us.

At around noon Alfred announced we should go and shave and put suits on. As I shaved I considered whether it was a good idea not to have told Alfred about overhearing Aunt Georgie talking to our sister Mamie about something to do with Katie, I suspected, and another painter called Prinsep. They were speaking in that voice women adopt when they’re certain they’re saying something no child can overhear. They’d agreed Prinsep was ‘very manly’ and a doer of things, who finished paintings, no fuss, no excuses.

Mamie had said, ‘How can you blame her? A virgin for ten years of marriage.’ To which Aunt Georgie had replied, ‘Well, Mr Prinsep may have seen to that problem.’

Later that day, I entered the dining room, where Alfred was serving sherry and whisky. Hayward was there wearing a riding suit of splendid cut of a similar style to my own suit of brown checks brought from London. When Mrs and Mr Peter Chard arrived, Hayward was attentive to them in a very gentlemanly way, and made no sport of Mrs Chard’s astounding accent.

Chard looked fresher than he had yesterday and shook my hand with new enthusiasm, saying he was sure I was more of a gentleman than my brother, for no gentleman liked to see another man reduced to insensibility and raving. ‘And my poor wife had to put up with me and find some surface on which I could sleep off my beastliness.’

‘I believe I owe you thanks for the work you did on tracking down The Moonstone,’ I said. ‘The author is a jolly friend of our father.’

‘I’ve heard that,’ said Chard almost as if he didn’t believe it. ‘I must keep reminding myself that you passed your infancy by the light of planets and potentates and grandeurs beyond our ordinary imagining.’

Inspiration struck me and I said, ‘But my dear Chard, they did not speak to me as planets and potentates and grandeurs. They spoke to me as men speak to a child asking me what my favourite toy was, and whether I knew the alphabet. You must not overstate our experience when we were younger.’

‘Well put, well put,’ said the storekeeper, nodding his head, and looking suddenly very much like what he was – an Englishman far removed from his home, and somewhat lost.

I could hear Mrs Chard speaking to my brother in the background. ‘Pu-er Mr Chard, he wuzz thut suck lest naight, Mester Deckins. Et wuz too badd alttugutha of yue!’

‘I am chastened, dear lady,’ Alfred told her with apparent earnestness. ‘I will myself tell Mr Chard to reject my future offers of hospitality, and for your sake I shall not press . . .’

‘Yezzir, dun’t you priss ’im anymower, Mester Deckens.’

Chard lowered his voice now. ‘My darling there,’ he said, nodding at his wife. ‘She is a pearl. And the wonderful thing in the colonies, you can marry anyone who takes your heart. Juries of aunts and uncles don’t have to sit on the girl and test her suitability. And so I have my love, no matter what anyone thinks. Oh . . .’

Almost in a whisper he added, ‘She has this voice modulation which is a little strange, but that is for my sake. She feels I’ve married badly and would love to pass as a stage Englishwoman . . .’

‘Oh,’ I said, enlightened, ‘that’s what it is.’

‘Yes, that is what she is attempting. It is altogether poignant, isn’t it? But it will pass.’ He paused and coughed. ‘I wished to tell you actually, Dickens, your brother has done great things here. We have peace. It is hard to believe that only two years past, Gow, the manager before him, had to fight off the Cooper’s Creek darks. Even the local Paakantji fear them. Gow and four of his men shut themselves up in my store, hammered up great bulwarks of hardwood and turned it into a fortress. A dawn attack took place, like it would in an American novel. But with some help from the Messr Bonney, Alfred changed all that because he refused to live as if he were under siege. There are some Cooper’s Creek men back here now, and I believe Alfred means to visit them tomorrow.’

‘Are you praising my supposed statesmanship?’ called Alfred.

‘Indeed I am, Alfred,’ Chard replied.

‘That’s an old song,’ said Alfred, before going back to talking to Mrs Chard.

Chard whispered to me, ‘Remember your brother’s wisdom when you get a place of your own, Mr Plorn. Let the darks take a few sheep. If they have permission, they’ll take fewer. Punishing every infringement will merely make them bitter and they will secretly kill many more. In Gow’s day, the Cooper’s Creek darks retreated over paddocks in which they left hundreds if not thousands of dead sheep.’

Alfred was clapping his hands now to alert us to the onset of the Christmas feast, announcing, ‘Lady and gentlemen, Mrs Geraghty would like a word with us.’

Mrs Geraghty appeared behind him in a white dress and large boots, with a handsome slick of sweat on her cheeks, and said, ‘For your Christmas meal, Mrs Chard and gentlemen, I have prepared everything from recipes supplied by Mr Alfred and Mr Edward Dickens’ mother in her famous cookbook, doing my best with Australian conditions.’

‘Splendid conditions they are!’ cried Alfred.

‘So,’ continued Mrs Geraghty, ‘I will start you off with Mrs Dickens’ menu for six to seven people, it being more promising for our purposes. We begin with Murray cod freshly extracted from the Darling River itself.’

‘Or a mud hole thereof,’ my brother interjected irreverently.

‘This will be accompanied by my dry-land version of oyster sauce.’

‘Very dry perhaps,’ said Alfred, enjoying himself.

Mrs Geraghty did not pay attention to him, saying, ‘This will be followed by roast loin of mutton and boiled fowls with bacon, accompanied by colcannon, minced collops, spinach and mashed and brown potatoes.’

‘Boiled fowls, Mrs Geraghty,’ Hayward interjected. ‘Are these fowl, or brush turkey impersonating fowl? I simply asked for the elucidation of the entire party.’

‘When I serve brush turkey I never pass it off as fowl,’ said Mrs Geraghty. ‘I have never done it in your experience, have I, Mr Hayward?’

‘I do not believe you have, admirable Mrs Geraghty.’

‘So I would be grateful if you asked only the questions that needed asking,’ she said, to which Hayward imitated a man impaled. There were cries around the table, even from Mrs Chard, along the lines that Mrs Geraghty had got him between the eyes and it served him right.

‘For your dessert,’ Mrs Geraghty continued, ‘there is the normal pudding of the season with a brandy sauce, and cabinet pudding made from our lemon trees, accompanied by cream from our few dairy cows. I will leave you now with wishes for a happy Christmas and a reminder that I have tried to give the Messrs Dickens a memory of their childhoods, and to introduce the rest of you to that memory. May God bless us all.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty. Don’t forget to take that Christmas bottle of rum to Clohessy’s with you. You mightn’t miss it, but I can tell you Clohessy can’t say the Rosary without it.’

At table we drank the white wine with the fowl and fish, and the red with the beef. The cod was wonderful, and as we broached the fowl and beef we paid further compliments both to Mrs Geraghty and to her prophet, Mrs Catherine Dickens. This induced a sadness in me as I was reminded that today my mother would miss the lively Christmases Father could still produce at Gad’s Hill, with presents, games, charades and plays.

Shaking off my sudden melancholy and grateful for the company, I said, ‘We have here at table five people of whom only one is colonial-born. I think we would all love to hear any details of your story that you are willing to share with us, Mrs Chard.’

‘Oh yue doen wanta hear abite me, Mester Deckens.’

There were cries from all of us that we wanted to. And so she began the story in her strained accent, telling us she was only colonial-born because her mother was delivered of her on the shores of Holdfast Bay three days after landing in South Australia. Her parents had been crofters on the Isle of Skye, but the kelp trade had given out so they took advantage of the colony’s offer to pay the passages of sturdy Highlanders and islanders. After their arrival in Adelaide on a wagon, her people had travelled north-east along the Murray River, and then to Menindee in New South Wales where she’d grown up and where Chard had first seen and recruited her as a maid or housekeeper.

‘And I was struck by her totally and at once,’ said Chard.

I did envy him at such a time as this, wondering when I would be struck totally and at once, and rendered incapable of worrying whether she was Imperial Sterling or Colonial Currency; nor how her opinions lay. When would I find all someone’s frailties enchanting, as Chard had found his wife’s? He had been very determined to identify as lovable quirks what others might regard as outrageous eccentricities. But that was his good luck, and the triumph of his generous heart over the more limited views.

‘What was Lola Montez doing at the Royal Theatre in Menindee when you were ten, Mrs Chard?’ Alfred said, as a tease.

‘Oh, Mester Deckens, yue know there weren’t enny opera in Minindee.’

‘I thought Lola Montez was in love with the pub owner there,’ said Alfred, winking at the rest of us.

‘Oh Mester Deckuns, yue are thet wucked!’ cried Mrs Chard. ‘My fether drove boolock teams, a humble Scot but greatly acquinted with the Scruptures, bitter then menny a Prisbytarian pastor!’

‘But isn’t it true he was a notable Caledonian highwayman?’ asked Hayward.

‘Mester Hayward,’ she cried. ‘Mye yor fibs choke your goud and trulley! Nun uv the Scots were cremenels. None! It is hour boust! The Englush and Irush are the creminels.’

And so she went on, galloping through thickets of diphthongs, searching – I was sure – for the sound that would not disgrace her husband, and failing at every turn.

By half-past two we were all in a merry condition and Mrs Chard was beginning to slip into her true colonial accent. ‘Orright, Chard. No more trouble from you, Sonny Jim!’

Mrs Geraghty came back to serve the pudding, receiving quite a respectable volume of amazement and acclaim from the company of just five. Rosy with wine, I looked forward to my Momba prospects and found for the first time in my conscious life that the prospect of the coming year held no terrors. I knew what to expect from the curriculum of sheep, as I never had from the school curriculum. As if to crown that awareness, Hayward was prevailed upon to sing a music hall song called ‘Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Man’ and then, egged on by a tide of applause, ‘The Lay of the Very Last Minstrel’.

The pudding was long eaten and the light was at last declining when the homestead clock announced it was five o’clock. The Chards were suddenly on their way out, with Hayward calling mischievously, ‘This time next year there might be three Chards.’

Not long after, the couple came back to the homestead with Alfred to fetch his tobacco. Finding myself alone on the veranda with Mrs Chard, I felt a general goodwill, and not least to this lady. I foolishly said, ‘Mrs Chard, you don’t need to try with pronunciations. He is enchanted by you and would be happy however you spoke.’

She astounded me by leaning across and kissing me. ‘You’re a lovely boy,’ she told me in an unstrained Australian accent. ‘But, see, I’m just keeping him interested with all the pronunciation stuff. Our secret. Orright, sonny Jim?’

‘Indeed,’ I told her, consumed with admiration.

Soon after, her husband and my brother returned, and Alfred and I saw the Chards out into the still heat of the late afternoon.

‘Why are you smiling?’ Alfred asked me.

‘They are an amusing pair,’ I told him.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘poor old Chard.’

That would always be his version of events.