She went to the dispensary. Tim felt very lonely, struggling with heavy-breathing Ernie. He found himself, as with children, uttering useless things—“Settle yourself, Ernie,” and, “She felt nothing, she was far away.” But he wasn’t himself a mere witness. His own eyes streamed. Sister Raymond brought out some murky fluid for Ernie. “Best to get him to sit on his cot,” suggested the weary nurse.
Tim wrestled blocky, crazed civic Ernie into the big ward, and could only sit him down by sitting down himself as well. The camp cot felt it might collapse under their weight.
She snatched Ernie’s mask away and forced the drug in over his lips. Splashes of brown fluid fell from the process onto Tim’s shirt.
“Damn and bugger you!” yelled Ernie now. But he gave up wrestling with Tim, who stood up and went halfway across the room and surveyed him. Ernie began to grieve in a more orderly way now, doubled over in grief.
Outside curlews and currawongs were everywhere raucous, disclosing as always the fresh day. Bullying the town awake, accompanying the dairy farmer and his lank wife and children back from the milking shed to the porridge pot in the kitchen. Unlyrical, practical birds. Galahs and the rosellas beautiful though, and frequent in the Macleay. The white cockatoos with their crests of sulphur.
Poetry had died with Winnie. No maiden phoenixes new-creating themselves here in West. Only the limepit.
As Tim wept, Sister Raymond came up and took off her glove and put a hand to Tim’s forehead.
“What can you feel with that?”
Ernie was quiet in his cot against the far wall, but Tim took up the grieving for him. And the nurse’s touch so welcome that Tim wished to raise his hand too and grab her fingers.
She said, “While Ernie rests, I must rest too until the doctor comes. I’ve had no sleep.”
“Yes,” Tim assented, composing himself.
The nurse closed their door on them, as a sign that she wanted no intrusions.
Not long gone when Ernie sat up again. He stripped his gloves off and let them fall to the floor, where they sat on splayed fingers. He picked up his watch and watch-chain and—as if to destroy time—hurled them to the floor.
“Go easy there, Ernie, old feller,” Tim advised him.
“You’re a bloody peasant, Tim,” Ernie complained.
Tim felt nothing but weariness. A swimmer without a stroke left in him. Kitty on the shore, frowning out to sea, could not be reached.
“You’re right, Ernie. Go very kindly to sleep, will you?”
“Winnie in your store, Tim. Your eyes were out on bloody sticks. Peasant bloody wonder…”
“Winnie is a splendid woman,” said Tim, choosing wilfully to speak about her as a presence. “You’d blame me more if I didn’t know that. Now please. You’ll disturb the poor nurse.”
“I suppose you think she’s a lady too, you stupid bushweek dolt?” The opiate had brought out aggression in Ernie. It was said to do that. The patient went best ignored.
“I have been so lucky with beautiful women,” said Ernie. But his luck made him wail for half a minute. “You think Winnie’s a noble spirit, don’t you, Tim? Winnie bloody Lady Guinevere? Reads poetry and yearns for refinement, and doesn’t get it in her poor bloody husband! Her old man though, her father the Brighton alderman, gave her piss-elegant old mum a social disease. And he… he was just one of those plain Melbourne fellows who killed himself when their shares went bust at the end of the boom. Didn’t tell you that I bet, not while she was buying the bloody bickies! Half bloody Melbourne offed itself in those days. Country’s never bloody recovered till now! Melbourne’s Australia’s elegant city, she’d say. Palaver. Melbourne’s a city of bloody horrors. Above all for the Belle of Brighton, Miss Winnie! Clapped mother, shot father!”
Tim managed to sit up straight preparatory to going across the room. But whether to hit or soothe Ernie was the question. Ernie’s pupils as huge as a cat’s now, Tim saw. His features were dissolving. Coming apart in his own sea. He wailed and wailed, and Tim eased him down. Sleep came to him suddenly, at a gulp.
Now Tim took Winnie’s letter out from beneath his mattress. It constituted a small risk beside having been kissed. The envelope was addressed to the Solicitor General of New South Wales, Macquarie Street, Sydney. It was easy to justify opening the thing—thereby, he argued with himself, he would know best how to protect Winnie, to champion her intentions.
He discovered a photograph backed by stiff cardboard. Missy looked clearly and knowingly at him from this picture. He looked again—he knew from the cricket match that care had to be taken with this identification. Missy. Not some child-woman from up or down the river. But Missy, dressed in a boy’s school uniform. She stood full length, and a banner over a painted scene behind her said, Tyler’s Touring Company. Indented across the top was the slogan: Miss Florence Meades in her Noted Role as Young Arthur. Her firmset shoulders were a fair imitation of a boy’s.
“Miss Florence Meades,” said Tim. The name was out. It escaped the barred room. It sat in the trees. That plain and essential name.
Miss Florence Meades—it seemed—was one of those young actresses who made a speciality of playing smartalec, mischievous boys from the best schools. She would have made a fine Desdemona though as well, Tim thought.
Some inscription in the bottom corner had been obscured by scratchy lines of ink. It had been deliberately and permanently rendered unreadable. On the back of the cardboard, in pencil in a cursive hand was written: Miss Meades is the young woman found deceased in the Macleay.
The handwriting was probably a disguised version of poor Winnie’s.
Ernie cried out in his sleep, as well he might. “Criminal,” said Tim to the vacant day. “Criminal.”
After one more calm survey, Tim returned the picture to its envelope, the whole thing to the breast pocket of his coat, where it sat beside his re-pocketed and useless statement of innocence. Winnie had scraped Ernie’s name out, had been uselessly loyal even in her fury. Did this doped lump of guts on the other cot across the room deserve such delicacy, a right to be harboured so kindly?
He knew the routine. He went and washed his hands with the carbolic soap which scoured the flesh. The name he had found would be released more widely than in a plague ward. It would cow the guilty everywhere, he promised himself.
Dr. Erson came later in the day, letting himself in with his key. At his shoulder, a refreshed Sister Raymond looked at Tim with clear eyes above her mask.
“Has Mr. Malcolm taken it calmly?” Erson wanted to know.
“He’s spoken in his sleep a lot,” said Tim.
He raised his chin so that the doctor could feel his glands. The name was out. Tim rejoiced secretly. Young Arthur was released from the glass.
“You have no swellings or fever, it seems,” said Dr. Erson almost in admiration. “Your pulse is normal. I approve of that, Tim, and would be grateful if you maintained it.”
A little irony in the doctor’s eyes.
“I intend to do that,” said Tim.
But Ernie refused to awaken to be chastised, and the more Tim waited, looking across the room at Ernie’s homely shape, the less scandalised Tim felt and the more an air of pity and forgiveness took over in the room. He was sure he knew where it came from. The Communion of Saints. Winnie and Florence Meades, Primrose and Lucy and Albert Rochester. The lenient dead.
It did not come from him. He was determined to punish Ernie at an early or late date, whichever proved more advisable.