I trust that fair-minded citizens will see that my three letters are a good and reasonable summary of an Australian democratic position, one taken irrespective of race and sect. In the spirit of that, I am, forever and with just pride,
“Oh, Holy Christ,” Tim whispered. Reasonable citizens! In a town where people wrote off to the supply houses in Sydney, saying you were done for. Reasonable bloody citizens!
Masked Ernie wandered in again, glum, and slumped down on his cot.
“Not allowed close to her. She has a cold and looks a little flushed. Primrose, though, not well at all. The glands show black under her chin.”
Poor Primrose then. Winnie wouldn’t weep for her, and Ernie wasn’t likely to.
Tim knew Winnie’s letter lay beneath his mattress, but he had his useless statement of innocence beside his bed. No use giving it to Ernie now. Ernie was out of the debate. Perhaps use the back of the sheet to write to Kitty. As soon as he felt the first fever. Not till then would he know what to say.
A restless grief for Lucy had grown in him again. He tried to contain and soothe it with print. He shook out his Argus—Ernie could bloody whistle for the Chronicle, though reading the Off-hand might improve his mental habits. Tim leafed past the serials full of genteel fairness and simple maps of the world. He began to read how New South Wales had defeated South Australia outright in the Sheffield Shield cricket in Adelaide. Where, reports said, plague had also made its landing.
At mid-afternoon, when the isolation ward was quiet and masked Ernie across the room and Winnie Malcolm further down the hallway seemed to be asleep, he decided to pick up his own white mask, tying it at the back, all like a well-ordered patient, and went down the corridor to the door of Primrose’s room. Sister Raymond, however, intercepted him at the door, forbidding him with her huge eyes.
“I wanted to see what it was like,” Tim explained. “The poor woman… she’s had no company.”
“She’s not aware of that, Mr. Shea. The struggle is extreme.”
Patches of supremely black skin now in Primrose’s half-black face. What townsperson, very aged these days, maybe under the sod, had taken his lust up the river to Primrose’s black mother. A quart bottle of port handed over as the contractual grounds for Primrose’s mixed blood. She had white relatives in town who did not know of her. Didn’t know that their blood went to make the plague’s first target.
An awful struggle for Primrose. Her chin stretched up above a mumpy neck. Sister Raymond put a wet cloth on her forehead, dribbled some water across her mouth.
“It feels so normal, all this, don’t you agree?” he asked. “So usual?”
Albert Rochester normal across Pee Dee’s shoulders with a bag over his head.
In the humidity of mid-afternoon the thunderstorm, still standard in this late summer, struck the hospital hill. Three o’clock. Beneath the thunder Tim, gone to Primrose’s door again, witnessed the last weak seizures. In spite of nature’s bombast and the fury of rain on the roof, there was no sense of a great culminating tragedy. Tim in fact felt he was there yet not there, witnessing from another place. In the spiritless moment, in the ward wilfully empty of human decoration, fitful pieces of old prayers and funeral verses spilled over his lips but reached no proper conclusion. And yet while distant, still too real, too actual.
Behind the cold glass of his own fear he saw something to be admired. Sister Raymond stood up to make a healthy distance though not ten feet between herself and the half-caste and took off her mask so that Primrose could pass with the sight of a human face. He knew at once he had never given Lucy such a thing. He’d given her an anxious face, a dutiful, solicitous, guilty face. But nothing as frank as this.
The struggles ended as simply as you could wish. Primrose exemplary and quick at the end.
Her recent employers the Malcolms slumbered. Their suitcases of fumigated clothes lay by now at the foot of their beds so that like Tim they could dress as usual inhabitants when they woke.
But they still slept as the two men came down the corridor past Tim and lifted Primrose up and out without ceremony and straight away.
“Make way, Tim,” said Sister Raymond.
“Call the Malcolms,” he suggested.
“No. Not now.”
“You won’t burn her?” Tim found himself softly pleading as the ambulance fellows carried Primrose fairly delicately to the door.
“Doctor will see her,” said the nurse.
“Where will she go?”
“Consecrated ground, Tim.”
“Where? Where consecrated?”
He might in fact need to share her space with her, Primrose, Ernie, Winnie, Shea. Somewhere, haphazardly and uncritically, he and Primrose might be free with each other’s limbs.
Sister Raymond’s huge eyes over the restored mask, brown with some selfless, calm, sisterly virtue. “You do want to know things, Mr. Shea. In consecrated ground. The edge of West Kempsey cemetery.”
“A common pit?”
“Tim!” the sister warned him. But in times of epidemic, he knew, it was a matter of common pits, not individual resting places. Common pits and quicklime. The rumour of Primrose’s girlhood, let alone all the uncelebrated dinners and ironing she had done for the Malcolms, would be resigned to the fast work of that pit.
For superstition’s rather than medicine’s sake, mask off now, thrown into a bucket of carbolic and water. Hands washed in carbolic. New mask fetched for coming use from the pile in the small room named the dispensary. No need yet to put it on. No close contact planned. But performing these small duties very comforting.
Back in the ward where Ernie slept, he took down the thorn beads and applied himself to reciting one of the Sorrowful Mysteries. Jesus Is Crowned with Thorns. Hands trembling, beads likely to fall. Under his whispers, Primrose and her handlers crossed the garden outside and vanished past the window. Out to sea with Lucy and the narwhals.
He would choose that, though. To voyage with lucky Lucy. Rather than be with Primrose.
Later, while he read, Sister Raymond could be heard arguing soothingly down the corridor with an awakened Mrs. Malcolm. Winnie crying, “But I must see her!”
For something to say, Sister Raymond advised Winnie to wait for Doctor who would be here soon. Across the room Ernie writhed in his shallow afternoon slumber. Sister Raymond came in holding up a hand to signify that Tim should sit still.
“Mr. Malcolm, Mr. Malcolm,” said Sister Raymond. Ernie sat up in his white gown.
“I regret to tell you that your wife has a fever.”
“Oh dear God!” said Ernie. “She isn’t ready for this.” He sat up. “We have a reconciliation still to make…”
“Come and see her. I have dressed her in one of her own nightgowns.”
Ernie reached for his pile of fumigated clothes, but then covered his face with his hands and was defeated by the prospect of dressing.
“I’ll manage it soon,” he promised.
“Yes, but be quick.”
The accountant gathered himself and picked up a limp, fumigated white shirt with a high collar, rushed into his brown pants without bothering with drawers, and hauled on a pair of oxfords without socks.
“Dear, sweet God,” he murmured softly, catching Tim’s eye. “It’s all too quick by half, Tim. Where’s the bloody time for a resolution?”
Then he sat on his cot again.
“Could be just a simple fever,” Tim kept saying. How could you believe bloody Ernie would have looked so affecting? Recklessly shaking his square head. Tears spilling from his eyes.
“I have put a fresh mask there for you to wear when you’re ready, Mr. Malcolm,” Sister Raymond told him.