“Is Captain Reid at breakfast?” Tim asked her.
She was an English girl, he could tell as soon as she spoke, and sounded very pleasant. Must be new, not part of the politics of the place.
“Aw, he’s up on the verandah, writing his letters.”
Her up was oop. It was his experiences that English people who said oop were honest creatures. The oop-sayers achieved no more credit with the big people than did North Corkers.
When he went upstairs, he found that the captain was not on the verandah, but someone was humming “Oft in the Stilly Night” in the men’s bathrooms. Tim looked in. The captain was giving himself another shave. It was known that he visited a woman in West. Would she now inspect him for fleas?
He saw Tim in the mirror and stopped his scraping.
“Can I help you?” he asked coldly. The manner of command.
“Captain Reid,” said Tim. Wondering himself why he sounded so bloody genial. “My wife travelled up with you from Sydney on Burrawong last week. Quite a fuss, eh?”
“Quite a fuss. Too much of one.” Now he continued to shave. “Going back and forth to the ship by drogher! I hope they don’t put us through quarantine every time we make the New Entrance.”
“If they do, we of the Macleay are put to inconvenience.”
He knew the captain would like such a sentiment.
“That’s what I tell people,” murmured the captain, caressing his jawline with the blade. “There are enough complaints already,” he said. “How did your wife find steerage?”
“She was a saloon passenger,” said Tim. “Travelled with Mrs. Arnold down, with her emigrant sister back.”
“Ah, yes,” said the captain. “If she left something aboard, you know, the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company office is in Smith Street.”
“Oh, yes, I know that. I wanted to ask about another passenger. She would have come about the New Year.”
“Not many passengers ever at the turning of the year,” said Captain Reid reflectively.
“A friend of mine tells me he saw a lad from Burrawong. Fresh-faced, wearing a blazer from a good school.”
“There was an effeminate sort of boy, yes, just after New Year’s. Visiting relatives in the Upper Macleay. A saloon cabin to himself. Kept quiet, as you’d expect. Sick all the time, I’m told.”
“What was his name?”
“A fanciful one. Alastair. Alain. Some name like that.”
These names, even though male and assumed for the voyage, went through Tim like light through a pane. Something potent was released. Its retreat left him lightened. He put weight on his bad ankle to remain upright.
The captain lowered his razor and considered Tim.
“Are you all right?”
Someone must be told and the captain was there, fit to approach Hanney without being bullied. “It’s the girl who died at Mrs. Mulroney’s. It’s the woman they call Missy, taking the ship as a boy. You must go to the police and tell them. For example, the boy’s voice. What was the voice like?”
“Well-modulated for that matter. But it wasn’t the girl in question.”
“Please, go and tell the sergeant.”
“I don’t think I want to involve myself too much with the civil authorities. What can they make of a well-modulated voice?”
“Was it English, Scottish, Irish? Was she really the sort of talker she appeared to be or was she bunging an accent on? Those are some of the things they could follow.”
“I think you’re leaping to conclusions. The boy was a boy.”
He was, very nearly, proud of the force of Missy’s performance.
“Listen,” said Captain Reid, “I was treated to the sight of that young woman earlier than most people, and it was not one of my passengers.”
“When you last saw it, your mind wouldn’t have been set up to compare the features with your schoolboy’s. I urge you to look again!”
Reid said nothing for a time and, as if he might consider using it as a weapon, slowly washed his razor. When he did speak he sounded pretty ruminative. “You’re a bloody nuisance with all this. What’s wrong with you? You’ve got a bloody bug in your mind about this woman! It’s a bloody impertinence that you should want me to take a cab to West to waste time with those great clod-hopping gendarmes! My company doesn’t want me doing excessive things in any case. They get a hard enough hammering from the Macleay rags.”
Tim however still struggling to sound desperately reasonable. “Some Macleay men—at least one of them—want her to go unnamed. It might be mere bush vanity in him. Would you for Christ’s sake consider doing what I ask so that girl can be put to rest?”
“No, I bloody well wouldn’t. They have the criminal Mulroney. I am a sailor, sir, who spent twenty-two years on the Singapore-Batavia run. I’ve seen shipmates drowned and fished them up as such inhuman lumps of rot that I became convinced rot is all. There are no ghosts to be appeased or settled. By your tone and accent you’re a superstitious man. When you talk about this girl, you see her as languishing somewhere. But whoever she was, she’s nothing now. She is nothing. Believe me.”
Captain Reid finished with his work and gauged himself in the mirror, sliding a hand along his jawline. Smooth as a baby’s arse.
“Your wife travelled saloon, you said?” It had occurred to Captain Reid that he ought to be polite to men who paid for saloon passages.
“She and her sister.”
“Well, please don’t think for a second that my convictions make me a less moral man. It makes me a more moral man. As the whole Macleay knows and is always saying—Burrawong is a difficult and somewhat older vessel. All the more reason to treasure my passengers’ lives, since life is everything and beyond is nothing. As it stands, the whole population, if you read the Argus, thinks I’m deliberately trying anyhow to spread the plague and enlarge the population of the deceased. So I wish to live quietly while I’m here. Good morning. I’m going to my room.”
For a moment, Tim had an urge to get in his way, but that would have convinced the captain he was a weird fellow.
Reid went indoors. Tim loitered a while, above the thoroughfare, seeing men open stores and put out goods. The old Jewish jeweller who spoke with a cockney accent put his trays of unaffordable wonders in the window. Missy might look in there, yearning for the gaudiness of ordinary days.
In the window of Savage’s stood a sign which said,
One sign of Bandy’s seriousness as a herbalist. If he were as sly as Savage’s, he would by now have bottled a herbal specific against the plague. But a sensible fellow like Bandy knew you could gamble with the colic, but better not dice with plague.
T. Shea—General Store couldn’t advertise pre-plague goods. Not with a post-plague wife and sister-in-law on the premises.
Back home, Mamie stood in front of the store, beaming. Plump Kitty inside, leaning against the door frame which led into the residence. She’d been waiting for him.
“Timothy, could we have a talk?” she asked.
He knew the trouble he was in, and why. She did not humble him in front of her sister, however. She was proving herself an equable partner in his decaying universe.
They went into the living room with its clock and ottoman and its bookcase: the London Illustrated News, The Standard Book of Great British Poets, Chamber’s Encyclopedia. And dimness.