Annie and Johnny experimentally worked the hinge to the sink in which their mother would wash tomorrow morning in open sea. Ellen got some marks with Tim by saying, “Come up with me on deck, you kids.” Of course, that left the old Arnolds in place still. So he could only say the usual solicitous things said by husbands when overheard. “Well, you’ll be right here then?” If the thing named Burrawong twisted on the bar at the New Entrance, how could she be right? Her brown, lively, peasant eyes glimmered. For she was a traveller. He could tell she had by no means made her last journey.
On impulse he whispered, “If anything evil happened to you, I’d be no good for anything at all. Who would I find to go to for instruction?”
“Yes,” she grinned, very brisk. “You’d mistake the faces of girls in pictures, and there’d be no one to sort you out.”
She winked at him. He kissed her, aiming for her forehead but, because she moved, getting her cheek. She stood calmly in his embrace and patted his upper arm.
“You’re a good fellow,” she said.
“Bloody good batsman,” he murmured, and they laughed together.
A cockney steward came in and palavered all over Kitty and Mrs. Arnold. He and Kitty took to the corridor to get away from him.
“There,” said Kitty pointing up and down the panelled passageway. “That doesn’t look too rat-infested, does it?”
Out on deck, a clear night, no sign of storms. But the sea was a real meander away down the course of the Macleay. He would need to inspect the sky, to read its face, for some hours yet to know how the night would go.
Ellen and the children down in the bows, watching a drunken acrobat do pretty well with somersaults. There was some sad hooting from the direction of the bridge and the cockney steward came around the deck ringing a bell. Kitty pushed Tim gently.
“There you are. There you go now. You’ll find on the second shelf behind the counter a list of the three-month-old accounts. You need to say a word to a few of them.”
“Remember me to your relatives in Randwick,” said Tim.
“Remember you? You’ve never met them.”
“Then you can bloody introduce me by photograph. The one with the straggly moustache. The masher one.”
“Taken to impress them by the village-load back home. Look at our Tim doing so well in the new world!”
“That’s the very one.”
He had the strangest, unsettling yet admiring feeling that she had become so easily separate from him and the children. A woman sailing on her own behalf. There were a few caresses which afterwards he barely remembered. Exiled in his own town, he went ashore with Ellen and the children. Burrawong creaked and growled out of Central wharf, and there on the dark river, seen by the lanterns on the mast, stood Kitty with her elbows on the rails! Various of Mr. Howe’s Variety’s local friends were hooting and whistling from the wharf, but the hugeness of the river and the night absorbed them all at a gradual but relentless rate. Performers and wives alike. The lantern on the mast was very soon all that could be seen.
“Oh, well,” Mr. Arnold said beside him on the wharf. He sounded like a man delivered from a social duty, a civil event or even a funeral, who could now go and take a drink in peace.
“They’ll be fine, they’ll be fine,” murmured Tim like a prayer.
“It’s very crowded,” said Arnold in parting. “Must be seven dozen passengers at least. The bloody North Coast Steamship Company has a cheek!”
And then, the complaint hanging, he was gone.
How he felt, Tim understood, was an echo of how his parents had felt seeing them all go. A jealousy of the size of the earth and the enormity of the night. The idea that the sea holds, caresses, owns the travellers intimately.
During the walk home, Annie and he on more or less the same lines as each other remained wisely suspicious of events. Ellen Burke and Johnny had the holiday fevers. The little bugger went all the way down Smith Street walking on his hands. Howe’s Variety had had a dangerous influence on him.
At home, and just to deepen his mood, Tim went into the store while Ellen Burke washed the children and readied them for their motherless night. He sorted through the pile of overdues which Kitty had left for him to deal with. Amongst them was a politely wrathful letter from Truscott and Lowe acknowledging receipt of part payment of their account but pointing out the remainder was overdue, and that he should be prompt to avoid legal action.
These clients of his owed him the amounts Truscott and Lowe were dunning him for. Holy God, the Malcolms with nearly four months unpaid. Ernie would want to give you an award for bravery rather than pay you for sardines! Others. Grant the pharmacist, more than two months. Things not good in that household. Like young Baylor a pleasant man, but said to be another opium-eater—or drinker rather. Draughts of laudanum for some pain he didn’t state.
Well, these were two, Malcolm and Grant, to give a nudge to.
Midnight. Making reasonable time on a calm night, Kitty should now be safely over the bar, prone in her bunk, blinking at the dark.
That night, to reduce the world to size, he drank some of the brandy he had last broached with Constable Hanney the day Missy had been presented. He lay down with a sugary, thick head. Deep in the night he saw Burrawong in a sunlit sea which reason said it could not yet have reached. He yearned to be aboard the vessel, so happy did her situation seem to be with the ocean. For a better view he sat on the side of his bed.
Not unreasonably the door opened and his father, Jeremiah Shea of Glenlara via Newmarket, Duhallow, brought the girl Missy into Tim’s bedroom by the hand. His father creaking along in a rare mood of levity.
“There you are,” he said. “Dear God, what a lord! In your big wifeless bed in New South Wales.”
He gestured to the girl, who wore a veil as protection from the glare.
“Man could not have a better fellow pilgrim.” And, as never happened in the years before immigration, his father prattled on. “Miss, here’s my son?” Old Jeremiah said. A social creature now, a rabid introducer all at once.
Missy lifted her veil the better to inspect Tim. The gaze was level and yet properly restrained. She was the sober person, whereas Old Jeremiah would have fitted in with the half-stewed boys around the keg at the cricket match, or with Howe’s Variety.
“She knows your face,” said Jeremiah. “We all wonder about the name.”
What was his name? And he wondered why did she think it important?
“Bandy Habash,” he told Jeremiah and Missy as a ploy. He kept his real name from them, and turned the heat of their attention towards the hawker.
She said, “I’ll put the veil back down. I get my blemishes from being watched.”
Tim said, “I’m sorry.” But he saw that no blemishes marked her face.
“No,” she assured him. “Not your fault.”
“I’ve overdone the staring business myself,” his old man shamelessly admitted. “Well, the day goes on…”
Missy took the hint and turned to leave.
“You came by ship,” said Tim, staring past his father out into the broad sea and Burrawong set eternally in it.
“Well,” said Missy, who by her tone was used to being mistrusted. “You can ask them.”