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  Nicholas had a meeting in Perth with the Chief Protector of Aborigines, and was told that his field-work projects would be useful in the governance of the natives. Aboriginal people were susceptible to the misguided influence of Reds and Foreigners and likely to be persuaded to sedition by God-bothering Missionaries. They needed to be watched, assessed. There had been ‘disturbances’, the Protector said. There had been casualties. Something hush-hush, apparently. Something unmentionable. Without enquiring what he meant, Nicholas felt assured of the importance of his work, knowing he would report back to agencies of the State.

  In Perth, Nicholas and Stella boarded a merchant ship heading up the west coast. Nicholas possessed government papers, which he waved authoritatively, and the crew eyed him with suspicion and mocked his snooty accent. Nicholas watched as they yarned and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, their manner collective, wry and self-assured; they swore, made crude jokes; they were their own community. He tried to join in, but was not admitted. Since he could not bear retreating to the claustrophobic cabin where Stella was ensconced, defiantly reading Shakespeare, he befriended the captain, another Englishman, as it happened, with a handlebar moustache not unlike Kitchener’s, whom he regarded as his only possible companion. Captain Smith gave Nicholas the benefit of his semi-local knowledge. The Aborigine, he said, like all primitive peoples, had a tendency to expire on contact with a superior race. It was the sad duty of Civilised Man to raise or erase the lesser humans, to enable the March of Progress and the Completion of God’s Plan. He confirmed that knowledge of how the black buggers thought would be useful in their management and control.

  Nicholas watched the captain extract a thread of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and flick it away. He admired this man, a man of action. The world, Nicholas thought, was built by men like Captain Smith.

  When he returned to the cabin, Stella was propped on the bunk, reading The Tempest. She wanted them drowned. She told him so. Something in their marriage had temporarily capsized her passivity. With wild eyes she stared up from under crumpled sheets and declared in a wicked tease: ‘I’ll warrant him for drowning, though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell, and leaky as an unstanched wench.’ The cabin smelled of Epsom salts and potions against seasickness. Nicholas turned away. ‘We split, we split!’ she cried out after him. Her voice was frayed and mildly hysterical. The vessel of their marriage was already sundered. The ocean around them heaved and roiled, and Nicholas, momentarily nauseous, felt like a child, afraid. His hand grasped the cold metal railing that led him back up the iron stairs, away from his wife and her fierce, lunatic quotations.

  In Australia, he knew, he would be a better man, more substantial and more determined. His wife would settle down. She would be well-behaved. He would find again the young man he was when his brothers were alive, full of potential, confident, sure of each step he took towards the future. The bodies of his brothers were rotted in Flanders, forever foreign, but here he was, in a new world, on a new adventure, bent on discovering the why and the wherefore of primitive man. It would be no explanation, but at least a kind of purpose.

  2

  It is difficult now to know what words might truly report them. Parents are recessed within us, in memory, in feeling, in ways we sometimes know best at faltering, precarious moments. A confident description is no guard against the discrepancies they hold for us. There is fond reminiscence and fickle recall; there is the freight of unsaid grievances and encumbering sorrows; there is stupefied infantilism and the persistence of their power. And more, perhaps, there is our faint speculation as to their indwelling lives: what lusts and frustrations, what cruelties and kindnesses, what dreams avowed, enacted or disavowed. We are puzzle-headed when we think of them. We are always subordinate. The cartoon they make for us can never be adequately drawn. In any case, some elusive dimension attaches to the imagining of lives that existed before we did, and to those, of course, no longer still alive. Telling stories, even in a whisper, carries this insufficiency.

  I believe that in Australia, my father, Nicholas, felt once again heroic. He was a frontiersman, white, filled with colonial aspiration. When he and Stella disembarked in Broome, in the remote north-west, he sensed immediately the promise and seduction of adventure; but his wife, looking backwards, sensed vacancy and desolation. The brassy light enveloped them, stunning in its brightness; there were wondrous high skies and broad horizons, so that Nicholas felt expanded, as if on a mission. Stella, on the other hand, squinted in a rim of shadow beneath her broad linen bonnet, smoothed the front of her stiff poplin skirt, and believed that her life, just begun, had already ended. She developed a tough fury that she would exhibit for the rest of her life, so that it predominated even when she might have found reasons to be happy.

  A trader from the ship drove them in a rattly Ford jalopy from the jetty to town. This was largely an Asian and Aboriginal town, built around the pearling and cattle industries. There were Japanese and Malay pearl divers, Chinese tradesmen, Aboriginal stock-workers, a tiny white community of owners and managers. Corrugated iron shacks lined the red gravel roads, many of them rusted, aslant, looking drunkenly derelict; there were boab trees, mudflats, mangy wandering dogs. Pearling luggers, caught by the receding tide, listed in despondent formations beyond mangrove swamps; the sea was visible, a strip of shine at a muddy distance. In town, small groups of Aboriginal people sat talking in peaceful clusters, or lounged in doorways, or on narrow verandas. It was a slow town, calm. There was a serene equanimity in the way the locals moved, in the hush of their talk, in the gestures of solicitude by which greetings were made and tasks were performed.

  Stella peered from the cabin of the truck and could not understand what she was seeing. So many coloured people. So many foreign faces. For her this was a place of utter barbarity, and she had yet to learn that this was not their final destination. Nicholas had arranged a stay at a cattle station in the scrubland of spinifex and rocky outcrops, twenty miles southwest, so that he might be within scholarly proximity of his chosen Aboriginal tribe. Papers from the Chief Protector of Aborigines – who owned, in a sense, an entire people – instructed Nicholas on a location, and indeed the terms of his project. Only later did he guess he was being cast aside, sent where he might be most useless and forgotten.

  They arrived at a modest whitewashed building, wooden-panelled and set on low stilts, called, somewhat grandly, the Continental Hotel. That first night, lying together beneath the high flimsy cone of a mosquito net, Nicholas tried to reason with his wife, but ended up hitting her. Stella instantly quietened. The bed they shared, enclosed against the tropical night and its streams of buzzing life, was sweltering and forlorn. It represented the world made brutal, another entrapment. Stella wept before she performed her wifely duty. Later, sticky with sweat and sexual fluids, aware of the smarting pain that had overtaken her face, she woke in the middle of the night, released herself from the net, and sat alone, on a hard chair, softly reciting sonnets.

  As if by some instinct the wretch did know

  His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:

  The bloody spur cannot provoke him on

  That sometimes anger thrust into his hide,

  Which heavily he answers with a groan

  More sharp to me than spurring to his side;

  For that same groan doth put this in my mind:

  My grief lies onward, my joy behind.

  In her own ears her voice sounded plaintive and full of loss. It sounded shabby, as if she had suddenly aged, become one of the women she had seen in London living beneath shadowy bridges, with their lives in string bags and their wits asunder. It made no sense.

  When the recitation offered no consolation, Stella wrote a letter by faint lamplight to her sister Margaret, telling her in lurid detail all that had happened. There was relief, after all, in silent words. In her own words, in those that fell in a cursive stream from her own inky pen. The nocturnal world, fractional and slow, continued around
her, wheeling towards dawn. Powdery grey moths hurled against the window screens. On the ceiling small lizards, the colour of her skin, clicked and scampered, their hand-shapes clinging. Stella watched them dispassionately. She resigned herself, that night, to gigantic unhappiness, the kind that novelists don’t write of, the kind that doesn’t kill, but preserves monotonously some empty register of experience, so that one waits, and waits, and waits, and waits, until whatever bitter end might mercifully present itself.

  At dawn Stella roused. She opened the door and pushed into a world dank and steamy with overnight rain. Unfamiliar flowers and raucous birdsong greeted her. It was like waking into a dream she did not understand. In the hotel kitchen, a wooden shed out the back flooding with vaporous new light, she met a kindly black woman who made her a cup of tea. She watched the woman at her morning ministrations – tending the fire in the stove, shifting pots and kettles, laying out teacups and spoons in symmetry on a tray – and understood that there are forms of order that might release one from meaning, ordinary tasks that might fill up an unfair life. She did not deem it necessary to talk to this woman; Stella was too disconsolate to express her own humanity. So she sat, tired now, bloodshot and hollowed by her wakeful night, and for some reason remembered Mrs Whiticombe’s old-woman’s hands, ropy and frail, spotted like old leaves on the verge of disintegration, resting on a pink candlewick bedspread at the moment of her death.

  The wind in the scrubland was sear and soprano. It burned and sang. When it was high, it hoisted eddies of umber dirt, so that the air filled with grit and was choking and dry. There were the swollen forms of spirals and belly shapes moving across the land; Stella found them eerie and preternatural. She learned to bring in the washing so that it would not be coated with dirt, and to close the doors and the shutters until the dust storms departed. She learned, most of all, to seal herself in, to find what solace might lie in self-erasure.

  Their lodgings at the cattle station were away from the main house, a small shack that had belonged to the stock manager before he suddenly left. When Mr Trevor, the station owner, first opened the door, Stella had seen nothing at all that could claim her affection. There was a combined kitchen-sitting room, ringed with faded yellow curtains, containing two upright wooden chairs pushed beneath a severe table; and a single bedroom, in which stood a sagging bed and a wardrobe, anomalously elegant, from another place and era. Disturbed by the sudden scrape of the door, a brown snake had slid out into the light and headed swerving through the doorway towards the long pale grass. Stella squealed as it passed her.

  ‘Better get used to it, luv,’ Mr Trevor said. He was unconcerned. He watched the snake depart and then spat on the ground, a hearty gob, as it disappeared.

  Nicholas marched forward to disguise his fear. He too was rather alarmed by what he had arrived at, the austerity of it all, the danger of remoteness, this slantwise light that revealed the cruel hardness of things. In the pit of his stomach he felt a seizure, a wrench.

  ‘Good-oh!’ he declared, and Mr Trevor, his hands on his hips, stockman’s hat tilted away from his sweaty forehead, bent forward and let out a derisive snort.

  When Nicholas pulled back the yellow curtains he saw in the distance a clump of acacia, and beneath it, in sparse shade, resting in the groove of a dry creek-bed, a family group of about ten or twelve people. They would be the subjects, or rather, the objects, of his research. They looked, he thought, rather mundane, not noble savages or extraordinary specimens of humanity. They wore cast-off clothes, mostly filthy and shredded, and had matted hair and looks of drear resignation. They roasted a lizard – one he would later know as goanna – in the ashes of a fire, and passed a canvas water bag between them, each taking a swig. He had read of this communalism, but found the sight of it disturbed him – so much bodily correspondence, so much touch and exchange. In a purely impulsive gesture Nicholas waved from the window, but no one saw him. The family continued their meal as if he did not exist.

  That night, tossing fitfully on a lumpy horsehair mattress, Nicholas dreamed he left the house through the yellow-curtained window (as one is magically able, floating in dreams) and joined the Aboriginal family around the fire. He sat in the dirt and shared their meal. The meat was oily and hot, and he had difficulty chewing it. Sinewy muscle and foul-tasting flesh filled up the chamber of his mouth, pushing it outwards so that his face distorted. Nicholas felt himself gag, and then began to vomit. He soiled his own trousers and was reduced, since he could not find the bag of water, to wiping away the mess with his two bare hands. An old man laughed at him, exactly as Mr Trevor had done, with the same tone of superiority, and the same mocking dismissal.

  And that night, for no reason, Stella dreamed that there was snow falling softly in the desert. As if beneath a plastic dome, or confined in the more expensive glass ornaments, she saw the slow descent of flakes, a little too large, and petal-like. In her dream she opened the front door and walked across its threshold, but did not feel the chill of snowflakes settling on her skin; they seemed to evaporate before they touched her. The place looked the same – barren, Australia, the light was glaring orange and the sky extensive – but held suspended this dissolving, impossible drift. In her new country Stella would dream this dream many times. It was always the same. There was always the stepping through a doorway, a sense of keen disconnection, of indefinable loss, and then of the air filled with delicate, illogical presences. She loved to tell it; her snow dream. She told it to anybody who would listen. She must have told me her snow dream ten or twenty times.

  My own dreams of my parents are always unpredictable. I used to dream that I bent above my father’s face and tried to prise open his stiffened dead eyelids, thinking to resurrect him. Then Mary would appear, and she would take me by the hand, and we would leave him lying where he fell, in mortal rest. Or I dreamed I opened the door to our shack, and there he was, a flash of light from his old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles signalling his arrival. He stood there, hitting his hat to shake away raindrops.

  ‘You’re back,’ I said, guilty I’d not missed him, surprised by the rain. He was alive or dead; I was never quite sure. He was indeterminate.

  Of my mother, who lived until she was almost sixty-eight, there are many, and many more complicated, scenarios. Her animosity towards me I deflected in dreams and tried, by means of my own poetics, to convert it to the friendship we might ideally have had. She was often smaller in dreams, and not so formidable. Our kelpie, Horatio, was usually there, and sometimes we were simply walking, side by side, but for some reason unable to see each other. We looked in parallel, and talked of commonplace things, of the weather, snakes, the people we knew. Once she fell into a hole in the earth but I could not quite reach her and when I peered into the hole, an almost perfect cylinder, I saw only two dull lights that might have been her eyes and I had to leave her there, languishing, calling out my name.

  In my dreams I still sometimes stutter, even though, at fourteen, I had been trained to overcome it, or at least to disguise my remnant halting. The images are fluent, but the language is difficult. My mouth seizes, convulses, forgets its easy applications. And in my dreams my father and mother do not appear together: it is as though I have always known they never quite met – never met, that is to say, as lovers do, with intermingling and exchange, and with lips corresponding.

  The afterlife I give them in dreams spooks me a little, but no more, I suppose, than this speculating testament. However, it seems still improper to dream of the dead. There is no satisfaction in their return, only metaphysical disturbance, the fake conjunctions that pretend somehow to be meaningful, now, only now, that there can be no repair.

  Mrs Trevor was a large, hefty woman, capable and determined. It was she who told Stella outright of her pregnancy, and recommended ginger crackers and barley water for morning sickness. A mother of five, she considered the experience of maternity unexceptional and better dealt with by robust and practical action than what she here percei
ved – retreat and denial. In Stella Keene she saw a woman afraid of life, and made it her task firmly to re-educate her. Of her five sons, two were out droving, somewhere to the north, and two were at the Anglican boarding school in Perth. The youngest, Billy, a simpleton, was still a child at home. She missed her older sons but found company in the domestic help in the house. There was a cook and two girls – ‘station blacks’, the whites called them – each sent by the Protector of Aborigines to learn the crafts of cooking and cleaning. These were ‘half-caste’ girls, in need of assimilation. Mrs Trevor – Vera – thought it her duty to civilise them, and to teach them good behaviour and habits of tidiness, to induct them into submission and quiet compliance. To Stella each of the girls, Martha, the cook, and Sal and Daff, all looked desperately unhappy. They wore loose floral-patterned frocks, all made of the same cheap material. They stood leaning together, conspiratorially, as if wishing to merge into one floral being that would conquer Vera Trevor.

  For both Stella and Nicholas, the pregnancy was proof they had entered a land of unreason and disparity. It shamed them both, but they were not sure why. Why should there be this surplus, when they had so little to give to each other? Why this person-sculpting, when they were both so concluded? Nicholas ordered a medicine to make it go away, but when the parcel finally arrived the cap had loosened, so that what they received was an empty bottle in a wrapping of brown paper, inked by pharmaceutical spillage. And as Stella grew larger, Vera Trevor’s sincerity took over. She made it more difficult for Stella and Nicholas to tell themselves, each night, that nothing would eventuate, that malformation would kill it, that it would never develop, that it would likely expire at an untimely birthing.