When it came to taking places at table, Mamie insisted on sitting between Kitty and Bandy Habash. Then the children down one side, and Joe O’Neill and Ellen Burke at the foot, looking a little wan together. Tim praised Ellen to Kitty, and recounted now the accidents which had marked her absence.
“Holy Mary,” said Kitty, “Pee Dee. And Angelus tower! If I’d stayed away another week, you’d all be dead!”
But tonight it seemed a comic rather than fatal possibility. Joe O’Neill flicked Johnny’s ear playfully, and even Tim found himself laughing.
A number of bottles of stout and ale had been opened with the soup, and everyone was drinking freely except for Bandy.
“Thank Christ I’m a Catholic,” said Joe, adding to the beer already in him. “Drinking’s the one thing you’re allowed. I would have made a rotten Mohammedan.”
But you could see by the way his eyes moved at the beginnings and ends of sentences and during silences that he was thinking, “Surely she can’t really like this little brown fellow?”
As for Ellen Burke, she kept dashing out to the cookhouse, just like someone covering up with kitchen work her lack of ease.
Tim said, “Now tell me, Bandy, these remedies of yours. Do they cure anything? What do you put in these things, Bandy, you sell to people?”
Kitty sank back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling; a posture encouraged by her condition. “Tim is a sort of Doubting Thomas. But I tell you, Tim, the man’s main tonic is a grand pick-me-up.”
All eyes then on Bandy. Ellen Burke’s dwelling on him from the end of the table.
“Give us a scientific exposition,” called Joe, winking, and sipping again at his beer.
Bandy murmured, “Where to begin? The chief constituents of the body in Punjabi herbalism are the blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, chyle, and semen. One element, when disordered, influences all the others through their connection.”
“Who taught you all this?” Tim asked.
“My father of course. In my homeland, there are a list of more than three hundred vegetables which can be used as cures. Some of those cannot be had here in the Macleay, though some can. We are able to get useful animal and herbal substances brought up also on the Burrawong from Sydney.”
“Any cure for plague?” called Joe. Desire and drink had made him mean.
“And then of course,” Bandy continued, “sometimes a mixture of the mineral and vegetable is required. Take the blood. We make a mixture of rhubarb and iron for our blood tonic.”
“Rhubarb and iron,” murmured Kitty.
“I feed blood tonic now and then to my own horses. For breathing problems I make up a herbal mixture to be burned beside the patient’s bed. This is moxa, which we are supplied by the Chinese herbalist of Dixon Street, and some Indian hemp, which grows wild in this valley and can be harvested by penknife. For the illnesses of women in pregnancy and for general liverishness, we use belladonna, which restores the fabric of women and is much appreciated. Mr. Nance the pharmacist, you will find, uses the same herb, the foxglove, as in Habash’s Heart Tonic.”
“A body of scholarship, Mr. Habash,” said Mamie, seemingly in awe. “A body of scholarship you carry in your head.”
Bandy gave just a margin of a smile but then swallowed it.
“It is true,” he said in a very low voice, which might have been actually beyond the hearing of Ellen Burke and Joe O’Neill, “that many people tell us that they are grateful for our remedies, more grateful than for some others they receive from chemists.”
“Sure, the chemists and doctors don’t know everything,” said Kitty.
Tim found himself treating Bandy’s exposition of his craft as a herbalist with greater tolerance now than he might have a month ago. He asked what other remedies. Bandy mentioned rhinoceros horn for older men, and ground quantities of gallstones from bulls mixed with cardamom and cinnamon. Arsenic was excellent for rheumatism and for the complexion.
Tim noticed Mamie had the hawker-cum-herbalist enchanted. The more substances he mentioned, the more his gaze turned to her.
Abruptly Ellen Burke stood up. All she could manage to say was, “Custard.” She grabbed the apron off the back of her chair and half-rushed, half-staggered out to the cookhouse.
“Oh yes,” said Mamie, rising after a moment. “I’ll help.”
Again, the amazing lack of novelty with which she moved, as if she’d grown up in this house. Her going left a silence.
Kitty whispered to Tim, “Go and see, Tim. Go on. Something’s up.”
Tim rose. Dear God, he was not as steady as he thought. Even on one leg.
“I’m just going out to lend a hand,” he told the other men.
Both Joe and Bandy bounded up. They did not want to see a lame man doing what they could.
“No, gentlemen,” said Kitty from her powerful, seated position. “You are guests.”
Outside, a light rain, softer than silk, slanted in under the verandah. He hobbled along under the covered way to the cookhouse where the fire was restrained.
From outside the cookhouse he could hear the women speaking, and a certain tightness in Ellen Burke’s voice.
“No, put it down. Let me do things, for God’s sake.”
“Would you prefer I didn’t help at all?” asked Mamie. She sounded half-amused.
“I’d prefer that you didn’t come in from nowhere, swing in on a steamer from some bloody damp heap of a place and upset friendships. That’s what I’d prefer.”
“Upset friendships. What do you mean?”
“Some things are already set up here. And you blunder in as if everything starts from your arrival. All earlier bets off! Well, that’s not the way you’ll get on here.”
Tim stepped further back into the shade of the verandah. He did not want to be discovered by them but also did not want to go.
“You’re teasing poor Mr. Habash,” said Ellen. “He’s a lonely soul, but you make him sit beside you. Only so that Joe O’Neill will pant all the more for you. Well Mr. Habash is more than something you can make use of, and he already has his friends. Don’t think of that though! Miss Importance from some shitty pigyard in Cork! Queening it in the bloody colonies, for dear God’s sweet sake!”
Tim waited through the silence in which Mamie’s temper—such to resemble Kitty’s—rose. “What a performance, miss,” Mamie ultimately said. “I’m not using Mr. O’Neill or Mr. Habash one way or another. Men use themselves and they always have and are happy to do so. Now, do you want me to help you carry in the pud or what do you want?”
But there was no sound of movement from within the cookhouse. It could be sensed that Ellen Burke was on the edge of tears or perhaps in them. She was dealing with an older, archer, and more stubborn woman.
“Your sister isn’t going to like it,” Ellen plaintively argued, “if you come in here interfering with old friendships.”
“Kitty? Kitty seems perfectly happy sitting there with her big stomach. Kitty’s troubles are over. Kitty is easy.”
“I don’t mean Kitty. Your other sister. Remember? My stepmother. Mrs. Molly Burke. A genuine lady.”
“Oh, Molly? Molly isn’t just like the rest of us. Always had the airs. All she was looking for was a chance to exercise them. And why would Molly be upset? You don’t mean to say she has a fancy for the little brown feller?”
This was fierce, close stuff, exactly like Kitty’s method of debate. Ellen could be heard frankly weeping. “We don’t want another bloody bitch in this country,” she cried. “We have a full supply already.”
Mamie turned softer now. “Stop blubbering and let me take that tray for you. Now come on, Ellen. Listen, do you love the little pagan? Is he your sweetie, is that what this is?”