They arrived back in the middle of the wedding arrangements and found Henry Underhill ill with nerves. He had swollen lumps on his legs like water-filled pigeon's eggs and, less dramatically, a measle-like rash across his chest. Charles was thus not only permitted, but instructed, to remain away from him.
On the wedding day itself Henry Underhill coated himself with calamine lotion before dressing in his best suit. He had striped trousers and a long black coat. It did not occur to Charles that his refusal to discuss the bond had produced Henry Underhill's illness and he did not mention it until after the wedding itself, when they were lined up for photographs outside the church.
The photographer was Jack Coe, of course, and he was darting around in his usual style, making sure everyone was in their place. He moved the itchy Underhill a fraction closer to Charles Badgery.
"I paid the bond," Charles said.
An odd smile surfaced from beneath Henry Underbill's moustache, a vulnerable nervous thing fearful of being squashed if it came out into the sunlight.
"You what?" he said.
"Now," said Jack Coe, "Mr Underhill, could you please…"
"I took the responsibility", said Charles, "to pay the bond."
"Ha ha," said Henry Underhill, looking at the camera. "Ha ha."
"That's right," said Jack Coe, hidden under his black hood. "Mr Badgery, please, a smile."
"You'll never make a business man, lad," said Henry Underhill, scratching himself in the secret of his pocket.
"I am a business man."
Emma murmured in her young husband's ear.
"I would have paid half," said Emma's father.
"Right, now, steady," said Jack Coe.
"I would have paid half!" yelled Henry Underhill. "You'll never make a business man. You'll never make a business man's bootlace."
It was the best photograph taken. Both Henry and Charles had spoiled the others but now they beamed at Jack Coe's camera and Underbill's face was so creased you could not notice the swellings. No one looking at the photographs since that day has ever doubted the quality of their happiness.
22
It is obvious to anyone – Emma Underhill was Henry Underbill's daughter. This was not, it seems, so obvious to Charles. When he paid his five hundred quid and took possession of the daughter, he imagined himself to have liquidated the father and erased his influence. So if the Marching Martinet had once fathered Emma Badgery, now he was forced to magically un-father her, to withdraw his penis and blow it like a nose in his checked handkerchief, to fold the handkerchief like a table napkin and slip it through a silver ring, to leave his seed where it would do no harm, on the kitchen table. Emma had emerged, de novo, untainted. Charles had paid his five hundred quid and Emma, therefore -I trust you follow – had never made her father's tea, blancoed his webbing, held out her hand for the sharp burn of his strap or her lips towards his frosty affections.
Once they were safely in Sydney Charles never mentioned his father-in-law again and the only message he ever sent him was each year at Christmas when he added his signature (C. Badgery) to the card his wife sent. And because his memory, like any river, changed its course, cut a corner here, exaggerated another there, soon all he could remember was that Henry Underhill had said Emma had a backside like a horse. It certainly did not occur to him that he had been warned about her mental stability.
If it had not been for the war (whose slow birth he had watched so keenly and also so wilfully ignored) I doubt that the question would have arisen. In almost every respect Charles and Emma were well suited to each other.
Leah, who came to visit their little shop, saw (typically) what was good about the place – that it had a murmuring, nurturing quality. It was a place of succour and tenderness. Leah was delighted with the variety of life, the rabbits, big and fat, the lorikeets as richly coloured as oriental rugs, the dull white-eyed python waiting patiently to lose its skin, the not-for-sale Gould's Monitor, the little seas of kissing jewels which were aquariums, the smell of straw, apples, grain, and the volatile odours of faeces which were, mixed together, pleasant and repugnant all at once.
Amongst these charges the newlyweds were like a pair of giant children, forever kneeling or bending, pacifying, supplicating their easily upset charges. They both had big hands and big feet and young faces and Emma's speech, although shy and indistinct, did not feel timid but rather sensuous and sleepy. She seemed to speak with the drowsiness of a happy lover.
It is true that Charles talked a great deal but he did not do it to exclude his wife and looked, continually, to her for agreement, so that the whole business enterprise was flavoured with their great tenderness together. And although Leah was interested in the problems facing the best pet shop in the world, what really pleased her was the couple's affection.
She was impressed too that they wished to do everything properly from the beginning, had made appointments to speak to people at the zoo, made notes and constructed cages that were really too big for the little shop. It was a mistake, perhaps. But they were happy not to have a prison like those overcrowded holes in Campbell Street. The big cages did create problems because they had to bunk one species in with another. The pretty blue bonnets had showed themselves to be pugnacious in the extreme. Feathers had flown. Blood had run.
And Emma had been wonderful, Charles said. The girl blushed and lowered her eyes. Leah could imagine those strong-wristed hands offering succour to wounded rosellas or rescuing a terrified guinea-pig from the well-meaning attentions of a buck rabbit.
She could not think of anyone who would suit Charles better. She seemed earthy, practical, loving and unpretentious. They both prepared the pets' meals together, working side by side at the kitchen table, carving dark hunks of horsemeat, breaking eggs, crumbling Madeira cake. They already had their own moth trap and would soon start breeding flies for their pupae. They did not seem to notice that their flat had a funny smell, but even this smell, unpleasant at first, soon came to be associated, in Leah's mind, with happiness.
It was 1938. Hitler was in Austria. Bukharin and Rykov were already on trial in Moscow. Bondi Beach was not yet strung with barbed wire, but the cafes were already filling with Jews from Europe. Leah Goldstein stood on platforms beside her husband while he spoke against fighting the Nazis.
She would appear, standing erect in that severe grey suit of hers, her flinty face unsmiling, like the popular image of a severe communist, but it was from this time that her letters began to fill with the sweet fecund odours of the little pet shop where she would go, more and more often, to drink tea with Emma, to watch her belly swell, to breathe deep of air rich with straw, rape-seed, molasses and fur.