The Lieutenant Part 9

Then Worogan called to her from the rocks, she turned and shouted back, and the moment was gone.

He waved from the doorway.

'Goodbye! Goodbye!'

They all called the word: the women, the girls, the boy. Even after they had disappeared beyond the rocks, he could still hear Boneda's clear voice: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!

Taking off his shoes that night, he saw even by firelight how dirty his feet were, each toe ringed with a dark halo. It was the shoes that did that, he realised. The toes of the natives, as straight as fingers on a hand, were not dirty. The dust must fall off their feet rather than be trapped by footwear.

As he got the basin and warmed some water in the kettle, he thought what a marvellous symmetry there was to the whole business. If you had the convenience of shoes, you also had the convenience of basins of warm water. But if you lacked shoes, you also lacked the dirt that made the basins of warm water necessary.

What was the word for foot? Next time he would ask Tagaran. And then he had better ask for the plural, in case it was as irregular in her tongue as it was in his own. He imagined himself earnestly showing what a quick pupil he was, announcing foots! She and Worogan had a way of not looking at each other, studying the ground, that he was beginning to suspect was their courteous means of not laughing at him.

He lay down and brought the candle close so he could read. He that shall tax me with ignorance, shall have no great victory at my hands. As I am, so I goe on plodding.

Montaigne would be enjoying it here, he thought, almost as much as he was himself.

The idea of tomorrow was clearly an elastic concept among the Cadigal. A week pa.s.sed, and Rooke's first visitor was Silk. His urbane face for once was creased with vexation.

'Lennox has done his time at the Rose Hill garrison,' he said without preliminary. 'Done more than his time, and is loud in pointing out that fact to the governor.'

Rooke felt he must have missed something.

'Time? Lennox?'

'Yes, and that poor devil Gosden is in a consumptive decline, he has not left his bed for two weeks-which leaves no other captain of marines but myself! Can you believe it!'

'Ah, yes?'

'Rose Hill, Rooke, for G.o.d's sake, Rose Hill must have a captain, and unless His Excellency swiftly taps you or one of the other lieutenants, there is no one other than me. Lennox says he has done more than his fair share for the breadbasket of the colony. I have to grant him that, the farms have flourished under his stewards.h.i.+p.'

Beyond the doorway Rooke could see a sliver of the path. He found himself hoping the natives would not choose this time to visit.

'His Excellency agrees that it is unfortunate,' Silk went on. 'But it is as he says, his hands are tied, he cannot send a man of lower rank.'

'But you know, Silk. It may be worth, well, a promotion.'

'Yes,' Silk said without enthusiasm. 'It may be. I hope so. I think it likely.'

A year before, Rooke knew he would have had a pang of envy at the thought. Rank: in a remote way he knew it mattered, but now it seemed bloodless and irrelevant.

'I cannot refuse, I can only hope not to be rusticated there for too long. My narrative is coming along apace, I am gathering speed with it and with all due humility I must say that in parts it is-well, I can only use the word sparkling. But at Rose Hill I will be sadly lacking in matter. What of interest could possibly happen with a hundred dull prisoners grubbing at the ground and twenty even duller privates guarding them?'

A thought occurred to him and his mood turned a corner.

'Unless, of course, there should be an uprising of the prisoners, or an attack by the natives!'

His tone said the idea was absurd.

This was the point when it would be natural to say, Oh, by the way, Silk, speaking of natives, I had a visit from some the other day.

He took the breath to say it, but did not speak. What had occurred the other day was more than just a visit from some natives. He did not know what it was, or why he did not want to share it. Only that it was private. Something between himself and Tagaran was exploring its nature. If it had to grow under the gaze of Silk he feared it would be stillborn.

'For your sake, I hope there is no uprising. Or attack,' Rooke said. 'I hope only a quick return is forthcoming. To civilisation.'

But if Rooke was honest with himself, it was not hope that he was feeling. It was relief. He would have his peninsula, and whatever might take place on it, to himself.

Silk had not noticed his friend rehearsing words he did not say. Having finished with Rose Hill, he now remembered something else.

'I suppose you know that Sirius is to be sent to Norfolk Island for a time? With your friend Lieutenant Gardiner, of course.'

'Norfolk Island?' Rooke was shocked. 'Gardiner? Sent there?'

'Why yes,' Silk said. 'Captain Barton is to sail tomorrow. The place is evidently more fertile, Sirius is to carry some prisoners away to reduce the burden here...I have no doubt you will miss Gardiner, but my word Rooke, you look as if you had seen a ghost!'

'Yes,' Rooke said. 'That is, no. That is, I am taken by surprise, that is all.'

He told himself, Gardiner is a lieutenant of the navy, his s.h.i.+p is sailing to Norfolk Island. It was an ordinary task in his profession. It was not banishment, it was not punishment.

But in his mind he was aware that two ideas had melted together, the way things did in dreams: Gardiner's dangerous outspokenness and what felt like exile.

'For myself, too, it is disappointing,' Silk was saying. 'As you know, I was hoping to persuade the good lieutenant to speak of that episode in which he had a part. But, like you, Rooke, he has a knack of disappearing from view.'

Disappearing from view. He had congratulated himself on having managed that, but this news about Gardiner reminded him how hollow that achievement could be. He had let himself drift in his mind some distance from serving and obeying. He had allowed himself to feel he was his own man, taking hold of this new place with both hands, opening all its doors himself.

But New South Wales was not an open door, and he was not his own man. New South Wales was the possession of King George the Third. The commission he had given his governor awarded James Gilbert sovereignty over every man black or white, every object great or small, and every relations.h.i.+p of whatever sort that might take place in his kingdom.

Rooke was not conscious of having planned his actions, but it seemed that he intended to keep to himself the events that were happening in the isolation of his point: the visits, the notebooks, his sense of having been offered a gift. But concealment might have consequences. He did not know what they might be, but, as he watched Silk walk away up the path, he knew that this paradise, like any other, was finite.

Rooke had learned some of the names of the women who visited with the children. At least, he thought the words he used were their names. Barringan was the fine tall woman who had come to the hut on the first day and was Boneda's mother, or perhaps his aunt, he had never got that quite straight. The old woman, clearly a person of authority, was named Mauberry, but Rooke privately thought of her as Nanna, because her cut-and-dried certainty about everything, as well as a wry humorous look, reminded him of his grandmother.

These women, and others who came only now and then, greeted him when they arrived but then established themselves with the babies around the fire some distance away. They busied themselves making fishhooks from curved sh.e.l.ls, and fis.h.i.+ng cords from bark. They held the stringy fibre up and named it for him-dturaduralang-mostly, he suspected, to laugh at the way he tried to say it.

He remembered his sisters as babies, but they were always swaddled in garments and wrappers like parcels, lying in the wooden cradle with only their faces and fingers showing. As far as he knew, they had never sprawled naked across their mother's bare thighs as these infants did. It had shocked him the first time, but now he wondered whether this was what a lap was for: to make a living cradle so that a child could abandon itself to sleep.

On some days it was Warungin who led the little procession down the rocks. The children kept at a distance while he sat with Rooke on the ground outside the hut. Sometimes it might be half an hour before Warungin said a word. If Rooke tried out some of his new vocabulary, or held up an object wanting to know its name, Warungin would make a minute adjustment of his position but say nothing. He did not seem to find silence awkward.

For Rooke it was like looking into a peculiar sort of mirror. Among his own kind, he was the one who made others uneasy with his silences. It was humbling to learn how to do nothing more than sit.

Sometimes Warungin arrived with other men. Then Rooke sat like a child, wordless and ignored, while they talked too fast for him to catch any sound that made a word he knew. In the company of other men, Warungin lost his sternness, and embarked on extended stories for the entertainment of the others. He was a mimic of great accuracy. More than once Rooke recognised Major Wyatt, his bristling indignation perfectly captured, or poor Gosden with his nagging cough.

He wondered whether Warungin also entertained the men with an imitation of the way Mr Rooke's mouth groped for the shape that would make some new word.

Now and then Warungin arrived ready to give Rooke a language lesson. He laid out on the ground all his tools and weapons: the barbed spear, the smooth-tipped spear, the four-p.r.o.nged fishgig, the sword-like length of wood with the oyster sh.e.l.l gummed into the end. Item by item, he taught Rooke the names. Dooul, the spear with two barbs. Wudang, the bone point of a spear. Yelga, the barb of a spear. Yara, to sharpen the points of a muting or fishgig. Rooke had his notebook beside him, his pencil in his hand. He knew, by some indication he could not put his finger on, that Warungin did not approve of the writing-down business. But he was patient, repeating the words and holding up the objects until his pupil understood.

When he gathered the weapons and stood to leave, the children came over. Tagaran, Worogan and Boneda were nearly always there, and sometimes two other girls confusingly alike and possibly sisters, called Tugear and Ngalgear. There had been such hilarity at his attempts to sort out the two that Boneda actually wet himself. Rooke was interested to see that this caused no embarra.s.sment. It was simply the crowning touch to the comedy, and a tribute to it.

He sat with Warungin as a pupil, he exchanged a few words with the women out of courtesy, he enjoyed the company of the children, but it was with Tagaran that he had conversations. She never came to see him by herself, but the other children soon tired of the games with words the two of them played. They had no patience with the way Rooke was not content to understand, but had to have a thing repeated often enough to write it down. After a time the others drifted away and left Rooke and Tagaran alone together.

Somehow, he did not quite know when it happened, she gave him a name, kamara. It meant my friend, he gathered, something of that kind. He did not know whether she had heard the English using the word comrade, or whether by chance the words were alike in the two tongues. There was so much he did not know.

Tagaran was the eldest of the children, but that was not the only reason she was so clearly their leader. In every situation in his life, Rooke had seen that there were people with a power of personality that gave them effortless authority. It was not to do with rank or position: the governor lacked it. Rooke did not possess it either, he knew that about himself, but Silk had it, and so did Gardiner.

And so did Tagaran. It was more than intelligence, though Tagaran's understanding was like quicksilver. It was more than a.s.sertiveness, though he watched her rapping out orders to the other children. It was a quality of fearless engagement with the world.

She never tired of giving him words, or of learning the English in exchange. Like Warungin, she was a vivid mimic and seemed to love the moment of seeing him understand.

When a baby cried over at the fire with the women, she explained breado tunga, she cries for bread. When Rooke gave her some-the greater part of his dinner, but he did not tell her that he would go hungry-to take to the child, she pulled out the dough with a word he understood to mean soft, easy for a child to eat, as opposed to the rock-like crust which she explained was hard, in the sense of difficult to break.

Tagaran gave him the words for belly, for back, for skin, for a boil on his arm, another that might have been finger or fingers or hand. He learnt the word for gra.s.s and for sand, or perhaps it was dust or dry earth. He wrote down the words that seemed to mean what, or what's this, as she held up his clasp knife, and the words that seemed to be show it me, or let me see, when he opened it and then closed it. When Boneda trolled a block of wood along the ground and the other children threw pebbles at it, she told him it was karagadyera. The block? The action of trolling? He was not sure, but wrote down the word.

He abandoned system, using a pencil for greater speed, scribbling open the door and I set it on fire and the armpit, or perhaps it was to tickle; Tagaran and Worogan were laughing too much to explain. In his haste he jotted down only as much of the English as would let him remember later what he intended. When the talk turned to the sun-Tagaran complaining that he was shading her from its warmth-out of habit he jotted down the astronomer's circle-with-dot. Under the press of so many words, his pencil split and she watched with the closest attention as he bound it together with string.

It was not the way he was used to working. Even the swiftest planet gave a man plenty of time to be sure, and to be neat. To work like this, not stopping to think, was a giddy exhilaration like drunkenness.

Language went in both directions. Without the benefit of notebooks or pencils repaired with string, the natives not only knew many words of English, but had already made them part of their own tongue, altering them as their grammar required. Bread was now breado, not simply borrowed but possessed.

When he heard himself do the same thing one day he felt as if another boundary had been left behind. Warungin, in teaching mode, had brought along one of the throwing sticks called womera. He showed Rooke how he had recently replaced the sh.e.l.l blade-the kaadian-gummed into the end. Kaadianmadiou, he said, and Rooke wrote it down: kaadianmadiou, I kaadianed it. Having written it, he realised what he had done. I kaadianed it: a sentence hitherto unknown to English. He was not simply learning another language. He was re-making his own. A boundary was being crossed and erased. Like ink in water, one language was melting into another.

Tagaran ran into the hut one afternoon, goose-pimpled all over, drops of water sparkling on her skin and in her hair. Rooke got up from the table but she pushed at him with a wet hand.

'Ngyinadyiminga!'

He could see that she was saying, You stand between me and the fire! and got out of her way. She turned around and around in front of the flames, s.h.i.+vering, a purple tinge to her lips. He threw on more wood and blew at the fire until it blazed.

'Bogidiou,' she said, and he thought automatically, from bogi, to bathe or swim, therefore, probably I bathed or have been bathing.

'My dear child, it is not weather for bathing!'

He knew she could not have understood precisely, but saw that she caught the tone: a big brother who thought he knew best. Just as Anne would, on being advised to wear her warmer but uglier shawl on a cold morning, she gave him an exasperated look.

The fire was roaring in the chimney, but she was still s.h.i.+vering, so he took his jacket from its peg and put it around her. For an instant he felt her narrow shoulders under his hands, felt the life of her, her breathing self, right next to him. Then she twirled like someone dancing a minuet, taking hold of the collar of the jacket as she did and handing it back to him.

Straight away he regretted that momentary touch on her shoulders. He might think of her as his sister, but Tagaran was not his sister. He wanted to explain, I have a younger sister you remind me of. But then thought, was that enough to justify such familiarity? If some native man, Warungin for instance, had come up so close to Anne, and put his hands on her shoulders, what would he feel?

He stepped back.

'I am sorry.'

It was perhaps not too late to rescue the moment. He hung the jacket on its peg, taking rather more time than the action required, and took up a position near the door, as far from her as the hut allowed.

She performed another turn in front of the fire and stopped with her back to it, looking at him. He saw her thinking, her eyes going to the jacket hanging against the wall, the man standing with his arms folded at the other end of the room.

'Goredyu tagarin,' she said, and went through a performance which included the fire, and the jacket, and herself s.h.i.+vering, from which he understood her to mean that she would become warm more quickly if she remained naked.

Which was correct, he realised, and showed more understanding of the logic of wet skin and the heat of a fire than did his own world of endless garments. Her explanation told him why she had twirled herself out of what had almost been an embrace. But he saw that she was explaining something else too. She had seen his unease and understood its cause.

Still he felt awkward. In fact, he knew he was blus.h.i.+ng. He could feel the warmth coursing through his blood, beating out against the skin. He turned to the table and made something of a to-do of getting the notebook and pen out and writing.

Goredyu tagarin, I more it (that is, I take more of it) from cold. That is to take off the cold. At this time Tagaran was standing by the fire naked, and I wished her to put on clothes, on which she said, Goredyu tagarin, the full meaning of which is, I will or do remain longer naked in order to get warm sooner, as the fire is felt better without clothes than if it had to penetrate through them.

This was longwinded, but by the time he had finished, his blush had subsided and Tagaran was no longer s.h.i.+vering.

She went with him to the small hollow he had cut below where water seeped out of the rock. Rooke dipped and poured, and when Boneda ran up, wanting to know what was going on, he let him dip and pour until the kettle was full. In the hut he put the kettle on the fire and the children saw straight away that he needed more twigs-they knew the same thing his grandmother had told him, little sticks burn the hottest-and they had the fire blazing and the water heated in short order.

He took it outside to the stump on which his enamel basin sat next to the rain gauge. He had wedged a stick upright into the stump and jammed his looking-gla.s.s into its split end, and now began the ritual of shaving, which never failed to entertain the children: the stropping of the blade on the leather strap, the making of lather with the shaving brush, the way the lopsided mirror caused him to tilt his head to one side as he drew the blade through the white foam. Worogan pointed to his nose, bare of lather.

'Minyin bial kanga?' she asked, why don't you wash this part?

Worogan was laughing sideways at Tagaran. She had lost her shyness, and now he saw that there was some private joke on the subject of his shaving, or his nose, or the whole business of being cheeky to a man, or to a white man. He pushed his tongue into his cheek to tighten it for the blade, peering into the insufficient mirror. He knew he would never learn what the joke was, but he smiled, mostly with his eyes to avoid getting soap in his mouth.

When he had finished shaving he folded up the razor, wiped his face with the towel, and tossed the water out. Tagaran picked up the kettle and shook it, indicating there was a little left, and by gesture asked his permission to pour the water into the basin, then she plunged her own narrow hands into it. Against the white enamel of the basin her skin was sumptuously dark. He put his own hand down alongside hers: pink, somewhat freckled, unfinished looking, he thought, by comparison.

He took her hands in his and laved them with the soap and, to complete her toilette, he wet the corner of the towel and wiped her face. She watched him as he worked. Further than her face he was shy to go: a face was a public thing but a body, no matter how childish, was private.

He gave her the towel.

'Wash, come, wash yourself.'

She took the towel and dipped the corner in the warm water as she had seen him do.

Watching her-her face showing every nuance of expression: surprise at the unaccustomed feel of warm water on her skin, wariness, the fun of doing this new thing-he risked a joke.

'If you wash yourself often you will become white!'

He did not know whether she would understand the words, or his attempt to translate them into actions, making to wash his forearm and then holding it beside hers, the white skin against the brown. He thought it a good joke, the sort of absurdity a child would appreciate, and all the more entertaining because his own skin was so dead-looking compared to hers.

But she rubbed at her forearm with the towel a few times, inspected it, and flung down the towel in a pet.

'Tyerabarrbowaryaou!'

He supposed she was saying something like I shall not become white!

She stuck out her bottom lip, pouted and postured, acting out despair. He was appalled, cursed himself for such a badly judged bit of tomfoolery.

Then she winked at him, and he saw that she was not acting, but overacting. He had made a promise as a joke, and she had taken hold of the joke and run further with it, giving it another twist that compounded its ironies.

When she saw his face clear with relief, she left off pouting and laughed with pleasure at what they had made together. He laughed too, astonished at it, so rich and layered.

But it left a taint of something else, a sense of the ease with which a thing could go wrong. He must be careful, he told himself. The rapport between them was easy, but he must not make a.s.sumptions. There was too much to lose, and not just the glory of being the first to speak the native tongue.

Afternoon was wearing into evening. Over by the fire, the women were picking up the babies and calling to the children. But Tagaran and Worogan were talking together and glancing at Rooke. Some scheme was afoot.

'Matigarabangun nangaba,' Tagaran said, and gestured, palm under cheek, finger pointing to the floor at her feet.

Nangaba: in that he could hear a familiar word, nanga, the infinitive of the verb to sleep. He already knew nangadiou, I slept, and nangadiemi, you slept. Was nangaba the future tense? Was Tagaran suggesting that she and Worogan sleep in the hut?

He went over to Mauberry and Barringan at the fire, trying to explain, to ask, to confirm the rightness of it. Yes, they agreed, Worogan and Tagaran would sleep in the hut of Mr Rooke. There was much hilarity. He had no hope of following their shouted comments but was pretty sure that they were about him. It was perhaps as well that he did not understand.