Part 13 (1/2)

Brutally, he made himself face the last thought: he had been flattered by her friends.h.i.+p.

Now, to put it plain, it seemed that he was the one who had been used.

It hurt to have been taken for a fool. But that was not the pain in his throat, the constricted feeling, as if he were no longer sure how to breathe. The hurt that was choking him was that she had not enjoyed his company, after all. She had valued him only for what he could give her.

Which was how he had begun by thinking of her. Until now, when it was perhaps too late.

The next day, after the noon readings, Rooke set off up the track. At the top of the ridge he did not go down towards the settlement but in the opposite direction, towards the bay on the other side, the one called Long Cove. He had often seen the smoke rising there, and Tagaran had told him how the c.o.c.kles and thick mud oysters loved the still water of that narrow bay. Once he had gone with her as far as a big rock from which the camp could be seen: a couple of bark shelters, a patch of cleared earth, a fire. She had made it clear that he should not go further, and he had not insisted. He had thought there would be other days, other opportunities.

Standing beside that rock today he could see that the cove was empty. No smoke rose from the mound of coals on the cleared s.p.a.ce. The huts were still there, but empty.

He felt a hollowness within, as if he had mislaid something and might not find it again.

He sat down on the rock that was the boundary between his world and Tagaran's. The sun had already left the deep fold of the cove. The water was black, the mangroves sombre, merging with their reflected copies.

The ridge on the other side of the cove was about to hide the sun. The earth was rolling on, carrying with it the speck of life that was Daniel Rooke. Whatever took place down here among the rocks and the trees, where human beings stumbled through their days in confusion of spirit, the earth continued to spin on itself and to draw its gigantic ellipse. Its urge to fly out into s.p.a.ce was precisely balanced by the inward pull of the sun. Whether an individual could see it or not, the sun was always blazing, always pulling, and the earth was always held by its mighty hand.

The water s.h.i.+fted, two ducks crossed from one point to another. Somewhere on the far bank, a bird was making the same sound over and over-whik! whik! whik!-as steadily as a man counting sheep through a gate. Out in the centre of the dark bay, a circular ripple formed that multiplied out and out, ring after perfect ring.

All this was nothing but surface for him: surface without meaning. He could hear the bird, see the ripple. That was all. It was no further than a dog might understand.

In Portsmouth he knew-so well he had forgotten ever learning it-that when the leaves of the plane trees became yellow and leathery it meant that the weather would soon be cold. When the moon was ringed with a luminous pearliness, the next day the sea would be hurling broken water against the s.h.i.+ngle. The fact of the leaves or the moon connected to other facts, each linked in the vast web of nature's logic.

In New South Wales, he could not see how things were connected to any larger meaning. It gave life here an oddly disjointed and tiring aspect, like moving through the world blind.

Tagaran knew the inner ligatures of this place in the way he knew those of Portsmouth. She would be blind there, he supposed, as he was here.

She had asked him one day to tell her about the place he was from.

'A harbour, like this one,' he said, and pointed to show her.

He had looked across the water towards the land of the Cammeragal and could see it as Portsmouth Harbour, looking over to Gosport.

'A little way across from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, like this.'

She had listened solemnly and looked where he was pointing.

He remembered the boy he had been at her age, and all the afternoons he had spent on the stony beach under the Tower, chilled through and through but dreading the return to the Academy. That boy had dreamed of beginning all over again, of a place where things could start from zero, not haunted by all those earlier failures. To be without words had been part of that dream. Now, on this wild point of land in this most distant of continents, that childish longing had come to pa.s.s. He had marvelled at it, a miraculous naked rebirth.

'A good place,' he told her.

Why had he said that, when it was not true? When you only had a few words to exchange, that was what happened. Truth needed hundreds of words, or none.

She had nodded. She thought she understood, but how could she? He had not tried to explain how it had really been, how it was to be lonely among your own people.

What was it like to be Tagaran? To walk about the woods barefoot and naked, as easy as he had been on Church Street?

He looked over his shoulder but he was alone on the hillside. The urge was irresistible, like hunger or thirst: to unbuckle his shoes, peel off the worn stockings, and stand barefoot on Tagaran's earth. His feet were as white as those fat caterpillars that were found here among rotting wood: vulnerable, weak-looking. He took a few wary steps along the track, then he was jabbed in the heel by something sharp enough to make him gasp. When he looked he saw it was only a piece of twig half the size of a toothpick. Was that how little it took to prevent him from walking in Tagaran's feet?

All his life he had liked his own company better than anyone else's. But now he was full of unease, like being too hot or too cold, or hungry or thirsty. It was none of those. It was that he was no longer sufficient to himself. There was one human, of all the humans on this spinning globe, whose company he longed for.

That was an education for a man who thought he knew most things.

He had been foolish, standing on his dignity as a soldier of His Majesty. He should simply have shot the d.a.m.ned thing off, and let her learn from it whatever she chose.

Back at the hut he got out the notebooks that contained their conversations. They were small enough that they could be covered by his hand. Shabby and insignificant, they were the most precious things he had ever owned.

He did not expect her to return. What was recorded on these pages was all he would ever have of her.

He opened one at random. There was that first, ebullient entry: Marray-wet. He could remember the triumph of it. He had been so satisfied with himself, he saw now, that he had even put a full stop.

He was chilled by the confidence of those entries. How misplaced had been his triumph, how wrong the dogmatism of that full stop. Marray. Yes, it might have meant wet. It might have meant raindrop, or on your hand. It might have meant dirty or mud, because the drops on his palm had made mud out of the dust that had been there. It might have meant pink, the colour of that palm, or skin, or braided line of love, dearie, the way the gypsy woman at Portsea Fair had once told him.

But written down like that, with its little full stop, the possibility of doubt was erased. The meaning would never be questioned again. What had felt like science was the worst kind of guesswork, the kind that forgets it is a guess.

And, of course, he knew now that marray did not mean wet, but was an augmentive, something like very.

When the boy ran off, that first day, Tagaran had said yennarrabe and he was sure it could only mean, He is gone. He could see now that he had wanted to understand too quickly. He took up his pen, dipped it in the ink and turned the full stop into a comma, adding: the English of which is not yet certain.

He turned to the long entry which Silk had read, and relived all its awkwardness. 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.

Ingenious as this interpretation of Tagaran's words had been, it was not correct. He saw that, although gore was to warm, goredyu could very well be a different word altogether.

There was room between the lines for him to admit to his error. This is a mistake. Goredyu signifies something else. Gore, to warm.

He had thought himself superior to Silk, who was innocent and smug in his belief that there was a precise unambiguous equivalence between words, and that one could exchange them as one might trade a Spanish dollar for two s.h.i.+llings and five pence. Now he saw that he had done the same. He had made these lists of verbs, these alphabets, these pages stretched like a net: other inflexions of the same verb.

But learning the Sydney tongue was not like that. Both the language and the act of learning had burst out of the boundaries he had tried to put around them. Proof of that was what he had just done. The press of the unknown had made him invent a new language, even newer to him than the Cadigal tongue: the language of doubt, the language that was prepared to admit I am not sure.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relations.h.i.+p with the people who spoke it with you. His friends.h.i.+p with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relations.h.i.+p.

The names of things, if you truly wanted to understand them, were as much about the s.p.a.ces between the words as they were about the words themselves. Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other.

To understand the movements of the celestial bodies, it was necessary to leave behind everything you thought you knew. Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.

In company with Tagaran he had glimpsed how everything found its place with everything else. He was afraid that was all he would ever have: a glimpse.

Then Brugden crept into the settlement with a foot and a half of spear sticking out of the side of his chest. Rooke heard of it when the boy from the regiment arrived gasping at his hut.

'They got the gamekeeper, sir. He is done for.'

He could hardly speak for panting, but there was excitement in him too, the idea of being done for nothing more than words for this red-faced boy, the blood vivid in his cheeks.

Rooke received the news numbly. The only surprise was his lack of surprise. The emptiness he felt within himself, the gap where happiness had once been, was made concrete by this news. A bewitched time, an impossible time, had come to an end for his private self. Of course it should come to an end in a public way as well.

'Major Wyatt says.' The boy screwed his eyes up tight to get the message right. 'He says will Lieutenant Rooke kindly attend at the barracks this evening at six o'clock, sir, with his compliments, that is.'

Rooke thought, I can feign illness, can tell the boy that Lieutenant Rooke sends his compliments but is indisposed.

But Major Wyatt was n.o.body's fool.