Bandy reflected on him a while and started to go, but Tim knew in his water that it wasn’t final. That the departure wouldn’t take. He knew it in fact before Bandy seemed to. And Bandy did turn.
“The fault is mine,” he said. “Miss Burke was not aware that there was any lack of amity between you and me.”
“Yes, but you knew it bloody well, and should have told her.”
“Miss Burke is faultless, and should be treated in those terms.”
He turned and stared at Ellen Burke, whose back was to him. She stood on the shady, eastern side of the cookhouse.
“We don’t punish women,” said Tim, proud of his manners, shipped from Europe and to the bush.
When Ellen would not return Bandy’s gaze, he walked defeated off down the lane beside the residence towards his wagon, which Tim could remotely see parked near Central wharf. A perverse image of their joint endeavours with poor Albert Rochester arose, and Tim felt regretful.
Ellen Burke stood between himself and the house and now turned, her cheeks plumped out with rage.
Trying to be conciliatory, Tim said, “Very well, you were not to know. But would your father and stepmother want the familiarity of a shared log? That’s all I’m saying.”
She went on regarding him from beneath the dark eyebrows her dead mother had given her.
“Naturally, it won’t go further,” he promised.
“But,” she said, not pointedly, not testy in a girlish way. Like a woman ten years older perhaps. “You’ll hold this over me.”
“It’s not my mode of doing business,” he murmured. She looked away but seemed to believe him. “Except, if you go back to Mrs. Manion’s, your father would know there had been an argument, and ask me about the cause.”
“So you will hold it over me.”
“No, but stay till Friday. If you like, stay till next week and meet Kitty’s other sister.”
She said, “You can’t turn it into a tea party as easily as that.”
“All right, don’t damn well stay.”
“You swear too much!”
“It’s an Irish failing.”
“Not only swearing, if you ask me!”
“You shouldn’t bloody sneer, miss. Your father came here without anything but a pair of hands.”
She said, “I have to see to the children.” And to show she was still arguing like an equal, “And you still have half an hour before closing.”
Though he intended to walk with her towards the residence, she made an officious and aggrieved detour towards the cookhouse. Feeling hollow now after his flaring display of anger, Tim turned through the residence and into the store where Johnny was, of course, chalking a wildly rendered tree on the floorboards, and Annie had climbed on the stool to extract cans of peaches from the shelf and fixedly build a pyramid with them on the counter. Tim didn’t have the steam left for an argument with blithe Johnny. He pushed the boy’s shoulder. “That again. You are a colonial ruffian who can’t be reformed!”
Annie stared at him, seeking with raised chin his permission to continue with her peach-tin construction. He smiled.
Kitty was on the sea off the Hunter River, and Sydney still a huge way south on a coastline of submerged ledges. She watched the sunset with Mrs. Arnold and perhaps drank for health and fortitude some stout brought to her by the Pommy steward on a tin tray.
The children stayed in the store, and he let them pursue their works. When the Central post office clock rang six, he closed the door, as the distant Parliament in Macquarie Street decreed. A curious thing—the power of such far-off authority. He was further from the New South Wales Parliament than the outmost Atlantic isle was from Dublin. How strange the consent of the citizen to government notices posted in the Argus. Rebellion was in his opinion not the mystery. Civic agreement was the mystery. Uncle Johnny and the other transported Fenians had misunderstood such things.
The door closed. He faced the house, the evening. Ellen Burke’s stew, whose smell warmly penetrated from the cookhouse, came like a pledge as far as the store, and would aid him. Stews made a man sleepy and served as a signal of the close of things. Ambition and industry unclenched themselves, were etherised by stew-aroma.
“How do you think that smells, eh?” he asked the children, who looked up at him in some wonder, some puzzlement, as if he were speaking to them in French. They took their stew when it came. Why mention it, though, while there were still peach pyramids to be built, boards to be profaned with chalk?
Tonight he was tempted to suggest to Ellen Burke that they ought all to talk at table as if it was Christmas. But perhaps that would increase Johnny’s giddiness, license his desire to be an entertainer. Tim could envisage how he might walk down the table on his hands, avoiding the vinegar cruets and the salt and pepper cellars by great concentration on the task.
Afterwards, settling with a somewhat water-stained volume of the London Illustrated News 1891 bought at the auction in Chance’s auctioneering offices from old Miller’s deceased estate. He liked these books, since they had the marks of the great flood upon them. The flood waters had read these pages too. The great brown, snaky Australian flood waters invading the genteel magazine. The news utterly out of date, of course, even by the standards of the Macleay. South Africa nine years back a minor cloud on the Empire’s remote horizon.
In fact in this volume, views of Uganda, newly ceded by Germany to Great Britain in return for Heligoland. Looked a bit like views of western New South Wales—wheat and sheep country.
Ellen Burke was settling the children in their bedroom. Later she would sleep in the screened-off bed on the back verandah. At the moment she did not seem to be punishing his son and daughter at all for the quarrel he’d had with her and bloody Bandy.
Someone was rattling and banging on the door of the store. He unlatched the storm lantern from its hook on the wall and walked out of the sitting-room to see to it.
At the door a man of ordinary height in an aged but well-tended suit waited. The cluster of rare acetylene street lamps at the junction of Smith and Belgrave Streets threw bright light on his right shoulder, but his square, hatted head was obscured.
“Yes?” Tim called through the glass.
“I wonder could you help me, old fellow,” the man said loudly, but then he lowered his voice so that it could not really get through the door glass. Tim therefore opened the door.
“Do I know you?” asked Tim.
“Perhaps. I just moved here with the bank. My wife’s having an important tea and—if the truth were told—gin party. To meet the locals. She’s out of biscuits and petit-fours and low on sugar. Does everyone on the Macleay eat like a bloody grasshopper?”
“It’s almost seven. Strange enough time to be having a tea party.”
“Know how it is. We’re a bit of a novelty and the guests won’t go home, and being newcomers who are we to tell them to?”
“You’re aware there’s a new law?”
“It’s a pretty poor state of human freedom when a man can’t get some shortbread and sugar for his wife’s party. Can a fellow come in?”
Tim opened the door just enough to admit the man. The man entered, pleasant-faced, smiling. Could of course be a first-class customer to have. Would no doubt want extended credit.
Tim asked him how much sugar and how many pounds of biscuits? Then stealthily weighed out the sugar from a bag beneath the counter into the scales. He went into the back storeroom where the biscuits were kept in their rectangular, insect- and water-proof tin cases. He weighed out the amount on the scales in there, put them in a paper bag, and then came out to the smiling man and weighed them on the counter scales as well. A conscientious storekeeper. Then he did a sum in his head and announced the amount the man owed him.