This part of the story is still popular around Jeparit. They say the goanna lost so much skin from all this patting that it soon began to bleed.
20
It is not true, of course, that business about the goanna bleeding -no one in Jeparit ever said such a thing. Not even the town that produced the Warden of the Cinque Ports could stretch to such a grotesque idea. It was I, Herbert Badgery, who said it. I was struck with a passion to make my son look a ninny. I did not plan to. I love him. I have always loved him. My greatest wish is to show you my brave and optimistic boy struggling against the handicap of his conception and upbringing towards success. And then, just as I am almost achieving it, I think of the way he walks, lifting his feet high and stamping them down. He walks like a yokel, a moron. I want to grab him by the ear and drag him to a quiet corner where I can teach him to walk properly. I love him, yes, of course I do, but I wish to mock him, not only him but his ladylove, not only her, but the landscape they inhabit, not merely the landscape in general, but the paddocks of Chaffey's farm in particular. I would like to take them, each one by name, and convert the dreary melancholy of the place into a very superior and spiteful kind of beauty, to caress the damn paddocks until they too begin to bleed.
Look at them, the three of them: boy, girl, goanna. They are all desert creatures, accustomed to eking out what they can from poor circumstances. In the goanna's case it does not irritate me. I expect it to behave like an opportunist, to eat twice its body weight when the food is available, because there may be nothing else available for a month. But when my son takes the affection Emma Underhill offers him, he does it in exactly the same spirit -as if no one, ever, will be affectionate to him again. He would fall in love with anyone, a butcher's cat that rubbed itself against his legs. And once he had done it he would be loyal for life. Of course I am angry. I am not an unreasonable man. I don't wish to deny him affection and love. I would not mind if he was likely to go flying off on a waltzing binge and get himself engaged to a waitress first and a telephonist second.
Can't dance? Of course he can't dance. Fa. He does not need to dance. He could not have seduced her better (made her head go numb, gormless, silly, her eyes go wider), not if he had spun her in her peach organdie ball gown round the Jeparit Mechanics' Institute.
They stroked the goanna until their hands were sticky with its juices. Then they borrowed a little dinghy and went rowing up on Lake Hindmarsh. He told her the names of the waterbirds. He kissed her. He wrote to his mother for permission to marry. And when May came they packed up all the birds and made a new cage for the Gould's Monitor and shipped them all down to Bacchus Marsh where Emma's family lived. They left the AJS temporarily in the care of Les Chaffey.
Bacchus Marsh is another town entirely, quite different from Jeparit. No Robert Menzies has been invented there. No, this is the town of Frank Hardy and Captain Moonlight. But my apologies to the Shire President, for I am not suggesting it is a town peopled solely with Communist Writers and Bushranger Priests, and I tip my hat to you Sir, Madam, to the Claringbolds, Careys, Dugdales, Lidgetts, Jenszes, Joungebloeds, Alkemades, Dellioses, and those of you who know Bacchus Marsh should skip the next ten pages for they concern only Henry Underhill and his family, and far less about these matters than you yourself will know already. There is only a mention of the plane trees in Grant Street, a nod in the direction of agricultural matters, and a description of the Underhills' house, i. e., the Underhills occupied a long low single-storey brick cottage on the corner of Gell and Davis Streets – where the panel-beater's shop is now. As you came down Davis Street you could look down into the backyard where Henry Underhill kept his dogs, those snarling chained bitzers that threw themselves so frantically against their chains that they appeared, at times, possessed of a desire to hang themselves.
It was in this house that Charles and Emma came to stay before the marriage which took place in that little weatherboard church with the high galvanized-iron steeple. I was not at the wedding, being still retained at Rankin Downs, but I can see the steeple in my mind's eye, a slender shining dunce's cap protruding from an electric green field of the sugar cane for which Bacchus Marsh is so famous.
The bell inside that steeple is deep and sonorous and many people will tell you that this special quality is attributable to the fundamental resonance of the galvanized iron and not to the bell. Others say that it is the intrinsic quality of the bell that Captain Bacchus brought with him from Burma in 1846. This is a good example of the stupid arguments that seem to arise wherever churches are built and Emma's father, besides being a pound officer, was a passionate participant in all of them. He not only held strong views about bells but (to take only one instance) on the crucial matter of whether an altar was really an altar or a communion table. Disagreement on this subject was enough to make the vein on his forehead take on the appearance of a small blue worm.
In short, he was a fool.
Henry Underhill was a man who felt he had been called upon to rule, and he was not put off by the fact that no one else seemed to have noticed. Instead he patiently collected, one by one, those small positions of authority left vacant by others' indolence. When no one could see the point in drilling the militia, it was Henry Underhill who had his wife iron his uniform and bianco his webbing, who tucked a baton under his arm, and barked at the young men until the street lights came on and even he had to admit it was time to go home. He was secretary of the Progress Association and seconded the resolution to have public benches placed in the main street. He was the head chap in the vestry. And, last of all, he was the pound officer, even though he did cut a funny figure on a horse.
Now, as only the last of these positions paid a wage, and that not a very good one, he was not a rich man. And although responsible for the Progress Association's bookkeeping, he was a nervous fellow with money. When he heard that the first of his three daughters wished to marry he did not, as his wife did, worry about the quality of the unseen boy. His first emotion was relief, thatthat problem was out of the way. Then he became – it took only an instant – nervous. There was a wedding to pay for. Worse than that, the Education Department of Victoria, having paid for his daughter's expensive training, were expecting her to fulfil her obligations to them. He had signed a bond guaranteeing that she would teach for five years. But now she was going into the pet business. The Education Department therefore required their money back. Five hundred pounds. This figure put him in a panic proper. He did not know what to do about it. If he had calmed down a moment and reread his agreement with the Department he would have seen that he could pay off the bond in instalments. If he had been the sort of man to share his worries with his wife, she would have been sure to have pointed it out to him, and even done it nicely, so that he would not feel stupid. But he had a stern sense of a husband's responsibilities and it would never have occurred to him that he might show such a frightening document to a woman.
So he did not reread the agreement calmly. He did not discuss it with his wife. Instead he decided, even before he met Charles, that he would extract the sum from him.
Now all that, in its mingy way, is logical enough. It is not difficult to persuade yourself that it might even be fair, and a simpler man would have set to work extracting the money. But Emma's father was not a simple man, being burdened not only with officiousness, meanness and nerves, but also with a sense of honour. He was therefore duty bound to make something clear to Charles before he began to lever away the five hundred quid.