The fairly neatly turned out young banjo player followed every smallest move she made, Tim could see. Every trace of intent in her face. He certainly had hopes of being her future target.
Mamie said, “Oh! Mr. Habash again.”
Seemingly her old friend, Bandy stood a little way off from the reunion, touching his hat.
“I didn’t expect to see you travelling with the hawker,” said Kitty, laughing at him.
“I didn’t know there’d be bloody plague in Sydney when I had a fight with him,” muttered Tim. “History is a bugger when you are in it.”
“This thing isn’t history. It’ll soon be over.” Kitty nodded to the banjo player. “Here’s Joey O’Neill who worked for the cooperage just over the Mitchelstown road. Three or so miles out from home, would you believe? We met him in Sydney and he’s going to be joining an uncle farming in Toorooka. Can you believe that one? My sisters went to a dance in Kanturk less than a year ago, and saw him there, and here he is on the Macleay. I think the world is certainly shrinking.”
“How are you, Mr. Shea?” said Joey O’Neill, saluting like a soldier, but not normally a shy-acker, only because he’d been drinking. You could tell his manner was more restrained at other times, and he was certainly terrified of Mamie.
“If you read it in a novel,” asked Kitty, “would you even start to believe it? Did you know he had an uncle and aunt in Toorooka?”
Under the power of the Kenna sisters’ sociability, Tim said he was as amazed as anyone. But he wondered how he was supposed to know of Joey O’Neill’s existence down the Mitchelstown road, and so how he was to know that the banjo player had relatives in Toorooka?
They introduced the fiddler, who was a Meath man joining his brother on a dairy farm on Nulla Nulla Creek. And then there was the young Englishman with some washed-out accent—somewhere like Essex—and a couple of Sydney commercial travellers. Decent chaps all of them, no question of that.
“I’m the chaperone for my wild sister,” said Kitty, nuzzling against him once more with an animal insistence. “Otherwise by now I’d be long asleep. But she bears watching.”
“Who’s chaperoning the wild chaperone,” he asked, and everyone laughed. “Welcome to the Macleay, gentlemen,” he then added anyhow at last, that duty devolving on him. “You’re only just inside it, but with any luck you’ll get further, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad news.”
“Rubbish!” called Kitty. “This is the greatest of lands.”
Still holding the fiddle and bow, the fiddler clapped the more or less formal speech of welcome.
The young men began to excuse themselves. Joey O’Neill thought that Mamie would do the same, and seemed to be alarmed to find himself wandering off alone down the avenues of tents, while Mamie stayed behind with the embers and her sister and the two visitors. He couldn’t come back without seeming an idiot, yet loitered in the shadows. The commercial travellers cleared up the stout bottles which lay around and went off themselves to their camp cots.
Kitty murmured to her sister, “Joe wants you to walk with him.”
“I’ve heard everything he has to say,” said Mamie, dismissing the idea. “Good night, Joe,” she called merrily nonetheless. “Thanks for the fine music.”
“You’re an awful hypocrite,” her sister Kitty whispered to her.
Now the camp was very still, but the river still drummed with frogs. Tim had utterly forgotten Bandy, but then noticed that he remained meekly there, keeping a distance.
“You didn’t have to come and see me,” said Kitty. “I’ll be home in two days, they won’t be able to keep this up. All this fuss. Boiling up all our underwear in iron drums. They won’t be able to do it with every shipload. Captain Reid says, we cannot put such hindrances to commerce.”
Smiling Mamie said, “Mr. Habash, are you a gentleman?”
Bandy shifted lightly on his feet.
“You should be aware, Miss Kenna, that I am a follower of the Prophet.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Mamie. “We’ve got prophets and saints to burn, so what does one more matter? But are followers of the Prophet gentlemen?”
“Better than some of the white brethren, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“That’s not much of a claim,” said Mamie. “Anyhow, I believe you are a gentleman, Mr. Habash, and I wonder if you would mind accompanying me down to the shore for a view of Burrawong while my sister and her husband spend a fragment of time together.”
“Miss Kenna, I would be honoured and it would be a sacred trust.”
“Dear Mother, Tim,” said Kitty. “Every bugger here’s talking like a play.”
In the moonlight, Mamie put a small but decisive hand out in front of her, signalling Bandy towards the river.
“Now you two just have your conversations,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Habash.”
She walked off, trailing a big straw hat. Bandy turned his eyes to Tim, and spread his hands in front of him to show they were vacant of any intent.
“Go on, Bandy,” Kitty told him. “If you want to be a bloody gallant, walk in front so it’s you who treads on the sleeping brown snakes.”
Again Bandy touched his hat, and caught up with Mamie. They were about the same height, and Mamie inclined a little to him, chatting away.
Kitty said, “She gives that poor Joe O’Neill an awful time, God help him.”
She stepped back and took Tim by the wrist.
“We can go to the tent. I’ve been missing you. Sydney’s got its points, but it isn’t Tim Shea.”
“How can we go to your tent? Mind you, I’d like to see it, of course. But Mamie could be back at any second.”
“Then why do you think she’s gone for a walk. She won’t be back for at least forty minutes. And if she’d gone with Joey, it’d be all over the camp by breakfast.”
Kitty was leading him amongst the quiet tents, a camp where few lights shone, the canvas itself offering only a night cry here, a brief fragment of snore there.
“How does a girl like that know these things?”
“She’s a Kenna, I suppose,” said Kitty.
This was nearly enough explanation. The Kennas knew things which didn’t seem to be known in his family. Kitty, for example, always insisted that carrying a child was no hindrance to love. The man needed simply to beware of his weight and take reasonable care. Who had told her that? Had Mrs. Kenna bowled right up and told her before she caught the boat? Had her sister told her at the wedding feast which delayed her in her emigration? It wasn’t at all unlikely. But could he imagine his mother, Anne, telling such things to any of the Shea girls before they took their American ship? Telling Brooklyn-bound Ellen Shea there was no need to put off further joy till three months after the child was born?
He had already stiffened up enough. A standing prick hath no conscience. One of Kitty’s axioms. From whom had she heard that? Did the Kennas pass such wisdom around the table?
For some reason, a surmise entered his head. What of Bandy’s Muslim prick, smooth as an eel?
In a light summer night dress which left her shoulders bare, Red Kenna’s freckles visible on them even by kerosene lamp, Kitty drifted asleep on her side. Tim, fully dressed again to fool the unfoolable Mamie Kenna, stretched atop Mamie’s camp cot and went profoundly asleep. Bending over him with pursed, knowing lips, Mamie woke him.