Bullen returned to the villa several times during the following week, on each occasion taking me out for a day or half-day of shooting. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was warming towards the man but I was learning to tolerate his company, and our excursions were proving so productive that I was increasingly inclined to overlook his intellectual shortcomings. Indeed, we were so successful that I was having difficulty in coping with the influx of specimens: by the end of the week such time as was not taken up with hunting the birds was almost entirely given over to preparing their skins.
‘How many honey-eaters do you need?’ asked Eleanor one morning, coming up behind me and surveying the heap of little corpses at the edge of my table.
I set down my scalpel, not entirely sorry to be interrupted. ‘It’s not a question of the number,’ I explained. ‘The thing is that slight variations between individuals – variations that might be overlooked in the field – could turn out to be important from a scientific viewpoint. At best, close examination might show one of these birds to be a new species. At the very least the group provides a valuable record, a basis for future research.’
‘Give me one,’ she said. ‘That one, there.’
‘What do you want with it?’
‘I’m going to paint it.’
I handed her the bird. She held it in the cupped palm of her hand, scrutinising it intently before returning with it to her table. ‘I want to paint it the way it is,’ she said. ‘Stiff and still.’
I caught the note of reproach in her voice and responded with a touch of irritation. ‘Listen, Eleanor, you mustn’t imagine—’
‘Nell. I’d like you to call me Nell. Everyone does, except him.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. We argue about it. It isn’t appropriate, he says.’
‘He may have a point. It’s not unreasonable for a father to want his daughter’s name to reflect her station in life.’
‘I have no station in life,’ she said, spitting my own phrase back at me as though it disgusted her, ‘but I have a right to be called by the name I choose.’ She returned to her seat, laid the bird on the table in front of her and began to pin a fresh sheet of paper to her drawing-board. ‘And you, Mr Redbourne,’ she continued: ‘What name do you want me to call you by?’
There was a hint of insolence in the question, but a kind of bashfulness too: I saw the colour rise to her cheeks as she fumbled with the pin. ‘If you wish,’ I said, ‘you may call me Charles.’And then, after a moment, regretting the stiffness of my initial response: ‘I should like that, Nell.’ She glanced up with a quick, brittle smile and reached for her paintbrush.
We worked for some considerable time without speaking, separately absorbed in our tasks. I had made a good job of the specimen in hand, and was just cutting the neck free at the base of the skull when I heard Eleanor sigh and set down her drawing-board. ‘What do you think happens to them?’ she asked.
‘Wait a moment,’ I said, working my scalpel-blade upward from beneath the vertebrae. ‘There.’ I lifted the body clear and dropped it to the floor beside my chair. ‘Happens to what?’
‘The birds. Once they’re dead. Do you suppose they have any kind of after-life?’
I smiled at the fancy. ‘A heaven for birds?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know about heaven. Perhaps they just go on with their lives in some other form. Or in the same form but more shadowy, so we can’t quite make them out.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said noncommittally. I turned back to my specimen and began to chip gently at the underside of the skull. When she spoke again, it was with an odd, compelling urgency that made me look up at once.
‘Would you stop for a while?’ she asked. ‘Stop working, I mean. Just for a few minutes. I want to tell you about my brother.’
I laid down my scalpel and swung my chair round so that I faced her directly. ‘Do you have brothers?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No brothers, no sisters.’
‘Did you never feel the lack of company when you were growing up?’
‘Not that I can remember. I’m not at all sure that I should have welcomed an addition to the family.’
‘Well, when I was small I used to pray to be given a brother. And for a while I’d pester my mother about it, in a way that it shames me to think of now. Later, as I grew to understand such things a little more clearly, I began to realise that I was likely to be disappointed, and by the time she broke the news to me, I’d almost given up hoping. I can still remember my feelings – a kind of astonishment at first, and then joy, joy taking hold in me like a flame in dry tinder – when she told me she’d been blessed. That was how she phrased it, and I remember the look on her face too, a look of such sweetness that, even now, I find it hard to say that it was anything less than a blessing.
‘We were both certain that the baby was a boy, and we talked of him so often that he became part of the family long before he was due to be born. I knew the places he’d want to go, and all my walks were taken with him in mind. And I’d talk to him as I went, as though he were really there, showing him the things I loved, and loving them all the more for being able to share them with him. I always imagined him slung on my hip, not heavy at all, moving so easily with my own movements that he might have been part of me.’
She stopped abruptly, half turning in her chair, twisting away from the light. Something in her face – some clouding or agitation of her features – made me uneasy. ‘Maybe you should get on with your painting,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your brother some other time.’
‘I’ve finished the picture. And maybe there won’t be another time. Not for this. I want to tell you now.’ She edged her chair clear of the table and leaned towards me, her forearms resting on her knees. ‘He was to be called Edward,’ she said. ‘Like my father. I used to make believe I was looking into his eyes and seeing something of my father reflected there, and I’d tell him how like he was, the very image of his papa. And sometimes I’d call him by his name, very softly, and I’d teach him to say mine, pretending to myself … pretending—’ She broke off again and began to rock gently back and forth, rubbing the palms of her hands against the rough fabric of her skirt.
‘So your brother—’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I want to tell this the way it happened. The way it seemed to happen, anyway. One morning I woke early – I mean I was woken, woken by footsteps clattering through the hall downstairs, someone running helter-skelter, not at all the way the servants would normally have gone about their work. And it wasn’t just that. All the other sounds were different too, as though I’d woken in someone else’s house. And my heart was beating very fast and hard, though at that point I couldn’t really have known—’
‘Don’t do that, Nell’
‘What?’
‘That rocking. It disturbs me.’
She glowered at me, but sat back in her chair and composed herself a little before continuing.
‘I ran out on to the landing, calling for my mother. But it was my father who appeared, banging back the dining-room door as he rushed out into the hallway. I can see him now, the way he looked that morning, staring up at me as I leaned over the stair-rail, his face grey like dirty pastry and his mouth twisted as though he were trying to smile and couldn’t. “Get dressed,” he said, “and stay in your room until I come up.” Then he turned to go back into the dining-room, and at that moment I heard a cry – not a loud cry, but a kind of sobbing moan. I knew for sure then that something was amiss and I pelted down the stairs and caught up with him in the doorway. “I want to see Mama,” I said, and made to squeeze past him into the room, but he moved to block my way, grabbing at my arm and knocking me sideways so that my head struck the door-frame. Not hard, but I fell to my knees; and as I tried to scramble out of his reach, I saw her lying there.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes, stretched out on the floor with the top of her dress unbuttoned and Mrs Denman kneeling over her, smoothing the hair back from her forehead. I must have stopped short at the sight of her – her face drawn with pain and the skin white and shining with sweat – because next thing I knew my father was bundling me back through the door and up the stairs. “Do as you’re told,” in he said. “Stay in your room and I’ll come up when I can.” He was trying to soften his voice, I could tell, but it came out wrong, and his fingers were gripping my shoulder so tight you could see the bruising for weeks after.’ She put her hand up to the place, rubbing it gently as if it were still tender.
There was a long silence.
‘And when your father came back?’
‘He didn’t. When I was dressed I sat on my bed for an age, and at last Sally – the maid we had then – came up and told me I was to go out and play, and wait for the baby to arrive. So I put on my shoes and my sun-hat and – have you been down to the creek?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, when you go, leave the main path at the fork and take the narrower track through the trees. After about half a mile you’ll come to a small patch of rough grazing. Cross that and you’ll find yourself at the edge of the most beautiful stretch of the creek. There’s a bend where the water slows and deepens, and a stillness all around that frightens people who aren’t used to it. That’s where I go when I need to think. It’s where I went that morning.
‘I walked slowly along the bank, talking to my brother as I’d grown used to doing, pointing out the things he liked – dragonflies, spiders’ webs, the swallows dipping over the water. But it seemed to me that he wasn’t quite with me – drifting away as I tried to interest him in this thing or that, his attention wavering and fading like a dying candle-flame. Or perhaps it was me – my own attention somewhere else so I couldn’t see him clearly or hear what he was thinking. After a while it became so difficult that I stopped trying and let him go. And that’s when I saw Mama, standing at the edge of the grassland, her dress as pale as the silver stringybarks she stood against, so that I could hardly make her out at first. But as I looked, she seemed to come into focus – to sharpen somehow, I can’t say how it was – and then I saw she was bareheaded, her hair unpinned and tumbling loose about her shoulders. And that was strange because I’d never seen her take a step beyond the garden gate without first putting her hat on; but it wasn’t as strange as what happened after.’
She had begun to rock again, the chair creaking softly with her movements. ‘I can’t help it,’ she said, catching my glance. ‘When I think about these things—’
‘There’s no need to go on if it distresses you.’
‘But it’s important to tell you. I’ve never told anyone before – never met anyone I thought would understand.’
I was surprised to find myself blushing, flattered no doubt by her implied regard for my perspicacity, but stirred too, as I was later to acknowledge to myself, by the subtle suggestion of intimacy. I don’t believe she noticed my discomfiture; at all events, she took up the thread again, moving smoothly on as though there had been no interruption.
‘No, the really strange thing was this: one moment she was out there by the trees, and the next – I don’t know how it happened because there’s some gap, a blank space where something must have gone on that I didn’t see or can’t lay hold of – she was with me on the bank, almost as close as you are now. I remember thinking how young she looked, her features fine and her skin soft, but very pale, and her gaze so mournful I can still make myself cry by thinking about it.
‘I’d thought when I first caught sight of her that she must have come to show me my brother, but now I saw that her arms were empty. “Where is he?” I asked. And then, because she appeared not to understand, I said his name, “Edward,” very softly like that, the way I liked to whisper it to him on our walks together. That seemed to rouse her in some way, and she fixed her eyes on mine and held me with her gaze. Her lips didn’t move, but I knew then, as surely as if she’d spoken, that she’d come to let me know that my brother was dead – that he wasn’t coming to join me and I shouldn’t wait any more.’ She leaned forward again, cupping her chin in her hand, and I saw that her eyes were bright with unspilled tears.
‘And your mother?’
‘Not there, though I saw her clearly enough. She couldn’t have been.’
‘Couldn’t have been? Is this a ghost story, Nell?’
‘Not a story, but the plain truth. And my mother couldn’t have been a ghost either, not in the way people usually think of ghosts. She didn’t die until late that evening. But I suppose some part of her must have broken free before the end and wandered out to find me.’
I regarded myself at the time as a thoroughgoing sceptic in such matters, but there was something in her words – or perhaps simply in her guilelessly expressive features – that set my skin prickling.
‘I think we should take a stroll outside in the sunlight,’ I said.
‘Let me finish.’ She brushed angrily at her eyes with the back of her hand and stared hard at me as though daring me to move. ‘I began crying then, whimpering like a hurt puppy, wanting it not to be true but knowing beyond all doubt that it was. But she reached out and took me up – I don’t mean in her arms, and I can’t say exactly what I do mean, but I felt myself gathered and raised, riding upward the way a boat lifts at its moorings as the tide turns in. And after she’d gone – and she seemed to slip away without my noticing – I was still held there, very quiet and still, sensing myself a little apart from the world but seeing it all so clearly – the ripples and creases on the surface of the water, the play of light on the eucalyptus leaves, the shadows sliding across the grass as the day wore on. And even that night, lying in bed, listening to my father sobbing and moaning in the next room, I could still feel myself supported, as if she were trying to …’ She trailed off, lifting her eyes to the cavernous roof as though she might find among its shadows the words she was searching for.
‘To console you?’
She seemed to consider this. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘I suppose it was something of the kind. I felt she was offering me her protection, though I think in the end she wasn’t strong enough to shield me from the worst. If she’d been able to give me everything she seemed to promise, the past ten years would have been very different. We’d have kept that gentleness about the household, the gentleness I remember touching us all – myself, my father, the servants – as she moved among us in life. And certainly my father would never have mistreated me as he does.’
‘Come now, Nell. I can see that you and your father have your differences, but you’re hardly—’
‘You can see nothing,’ she cut in angrily, starting to her feet. ‘Nothing at all.’ The colour was up in her cheeks again, her breathing fast and shallow. She leaned over her drawing-board and began to unpin the paper. ‘I did this for you,’ she said, ‘but I might have saved myself the trouble.’
‘Nell,’ I said, moving towards her, ‘you’re not to talk like that. Do you hear me? Let me look.’ She glared but made way for me, stepping back from the table so that I could see the painting more clearly.
What is it in art that opens our eyes and hearts to truths barely glimpsed in life? I had spent the best part of a morning staring at a succession of small corpses without registering what I was dealing with. Now, bending above Eleanor’s painting – nothing, on the face of it, but streaks and clots of pigment on a cockled sheet of paper – I was jolted into awareness like a man roused suddenly from a profound sleep. The bird had been represented in profile and at such an angle in relation to the paper that, with bill slightly parted and neck extended, it seemed at first glance to be singing in blind ecstasy. Even the stiff left wing, held just wide of the body, might have been taken to indicate a taut vitality; but then the eye travelled to the dull badge of blood on the breast, to the legs, folded too close against the belly, and to the cramped grip of the feet on thin air. It was a remarkable achievement. By some expressive sleight of hand, Eleanor had contrived to suggest, more or less simultaneously, both the brute fact of death and the vibrant life from which the creature had been plucked; and it was in that poignant double focus that I discovered a truth which none of the morning’s cutting and probing had succeeded in laying bare.
It was undoubtedly the image itself that moved me in the first instance, but it may be that what tipped the balance was Eleanor’s giving of it – half sullen, half eager, her eyes lifted to mine as she handed me the sheet. At all events, my voice cracked as I thanked her, and I found myself, quite unexpectedly and with some embarrassment, on the verge of tears.