Part 9 (1/2)

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.