Affection, p.20
Affection, page 20
Humphry was saying Maria had been worried and wanted to know if I was coming home. I nodded, and stood.
I went over to the girl. She was still asleep and her breathing much easier. I touched her forehead. Her fever had actually come down.
And so I went home. As I sat beside Humphry in his buggy, the sea air revived me and I told him my new germ theory – the one in which I was either God’s or Gard’s agent.
‘The way you describe it, it sounds more like a conspiracy than an Act of God,’ said Humphry. ‘But I’m sure there’s a more rational way of looking at it.’
‘Not this time.’
In morning light Humphry and I sat at the kitchen table as Maria filled the teapot from the steaming stove-black fountain.
‘How is the little girl?’ said Maria. She had one of those flat Irish voices, but I’d always found the lightness of it powerfully attractive. She didn’t look at me. She wore a blue winter dress, rather formal for indoors. As she stirred the pot I stared at her forearms. I hadn’t noticed before how brown they’d become. She must have been out in the vegetable garden.
‘Better,’ I said. I asked where Allan and the girls were.
‘School.’
I tried to think what day it was. Monday?
Maria, my wife, wore her long dark hair in a tight bun, French style. As she turned I noticed also that her face was brown and she looked healthier than I’d seen her for some time, although there were bags under her eyes. So she hadn’t slept much either. I scratched the stubble on my chin.
As she put the pot down between Humphry and me, she gave me a smile. When had I stopped noticing these things? Well, of course, I knew when. I turned to Humphry and said there must be many things waiting for us to do.
‘Should we be going?’
Maria paused at the cupboard.
‘Well, no,’ said Humphry. ‘Wouldn’t you know, there’s actually nothing to do at the moment.’
Maria brought over the good cups and saucers.
Humphry said, ‘Funny isn’t it how things run on and on at such a pace and then,’ he clapped a hand on the table rattling the cups, ‘it stops. Anyway, I don’t know about you, Lin, but I need this cup of tea.’
I saw them exchange a glance. I wondered about conspiracies. I knew they both thought I might be mad. And I knew why.
‘You’re right, I suppose. I need a wash anyway.’
‘Take the rest of the day,’ said Humphry. ‘Up all night tending the sick. Can’t be expected to work twenty-four hours a day. I’ll tell Turner.’
Yes, I said.
But the thought of being home alone all day with Maria made me afraid. There were some things I couldn’t face.
There was another long silence as Maria spun the teapot left, then right, and poured. She leaned over me to do this and I could smell that womanly smell of soap from the laundry. Her brown jaw was firm, a small nose, an attractive wife.
She poured herself a cup and sat at the end of the table and we politely sipped our tea.
She had an aristocratic habit of crooking a little finger as she drank. I used to say that I rescued her from Inniskillen and she’d say I kidnapped her.
Our little joke.
She missed her family, of course she did, and I often wondered why she’d married me, against her father’s wishes, a young doctor from the colonies, but it seemed a long time ago and so far away. Four children ago.
‘I don’t know what the girl’s name is.’ I said this out loud. It had just occurred to me no one had told me, and it wasn’t on her paperwork. Just ‘Child: Gard’.
‘You know, I never thought to ask the mother,’ said Humphry, and I caught another fleeting look from Maria to Humphry.
I found myself staring at Humphry and he gave me a hard look back.
‘You look terrible, Lin,’ he said. ‘You never were a pretty chap, but by God you’re a sight. When was the last time you slept?’
‘You woke me up only hours ago.’
‘Did I? Well, don’t blame me for your appearance. Maria, what are you doing to care for this husband of yours?’
If that had come from anyone else Maria might have flown at him, but she simply laughed then, knowing Humphry. And I smiled to see it.
‘I think he’s having an affaire de coeur,’ she said, her eyes on me.
‘I suspect something like that, too. The hours he keeps.’
The laughter petered away, and Humphry said, ‘I have a better theory about the Gards. Want to hear it?’
I shook my head, looking at Maria, but she leaned forward and Humphry pressed on.
‘There’d be fleas on the quarantine station goats,’ he said. I shook my head again, but he said, ‘Listen, it’s actually along the same line as yours.’
Gard discovered the truth about his treacherous wife, he said.
‘Treacherous?’
Humphry looked at Maria. ‘Fallen,’ he said. Perhaps the men talked. There was little else to do. And when those sorts of men talked, it always turned to women.
Gard listened coolly, said Humphry, but he had a burning rage as he recognised the woman they bragged about. The next day he shot a goat for the camp and put some fleas into a bottle.
Humphry rubbed his hands together, pleased with his theory.
‘This is the best bit,’ he said.
That night, with Storm in a fever, he pressed the bottle to Storm’s thigh. Next day he recaptured some of them! It explained how Gard might have himself caught plague, said Humphry, if a flea escaped and bit him. Anyway, he put the fleas in the envelope with the poison label and had the honourable and reliable Dr Row deliver the message. It was cunning: a suggestion, a threat and an attempt at murder all in one. It worked. Mrs Gard, filled with remorse and guilt, took what Gard knew was at hand – Rough on Rats.
‘Why would she take what she feared?’ asked Maria.
‘The power of suggestion,’ said Humphry.
Listening to him, I wondered if Humphry wasn’t inviting me to question the absurdity of the theory. Maria, though, had a hand over her mouth, shocked and fascinated by Humphry’s story.
Humphry continued. The agony was too great and she took herself off to the rail yards and waited for a locomotive. Gard himself had by then succumbed to plague from the very fleas he’d enlisted as assassins.
Humphry slapped the table and sat back, pleased with himself and certain I would be comforted.
‘What about the child?’ I said. ‘The man wouldn’t put his daughter at risk, surely.’
‘He wasn’t thinking about his daughter,’ said Humphry, lighting a cigarette. ‘Only revenge. And if that’s the case, it shows you what a scoundrel the man was and that even death from plague was too good for him.’
I supposed it took the act out of God’s hands and put it in a man’s, which should have been some comfort to me. I told Humphry it was a good theory.
‘Good? It’s better than good. It’s damned perfect. If the man was still alive I’d shake his hand and put him on the end of a rope. I should have been a barrister.’ But he winked at me.
Maria poured more tea.
I said there were a lot of ‘ifs’ in his theory.
‘Avec des “si” on mettrait Paris en bouteille,’ said Maria.
‘What was that?’ said Humphry, looking from me to Maria.
‘With “ifs” one could put Paris in a bottle,’ she told him.
He picked up his tea and finished it. ‘Is that right?’ he said, looking at me. ‘Sounds a bit like “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”, and I can take a hint.’
‘No, it’s just an expression. Please don’t leave,’ said Maria.
‘I do have to go,’ said Humphry. I rose. ‘You’re staying,’ he told me.
‘I’ll see you out.’ I was too tired to argue.
When Humphry was gone I went out to the bathroom. The house was silent. There were things to be said. I watched her iron a fresh shirt.
I couldn’t find the words, somehow.
I stood at the door in my undershirt and trousers, braces hanging loose, and she turned and brought me the shirt, pressing it into my chest. I felt those cool forearms against me and she was looking directly into my eyes.
‘Why don’t you go into the bedroom,’ she said. ‘And lie down.’
But I heard myself say, as if from a great distance, that I really had to get to work.
When I got to my office I laid my head on my desk and slept until well after noon.
My throbbing tooth woke me.
That afternoon I learnt from Turner that no one had claimed Mrs Gard’s body. Everyone had forgotten about her husband’s possessions, the bag in my cupboard, and I realised I still had her purse, despite my promise to return it to Moylan.
The newspapers that day had devoted just as many column inches to plague as to war. The first case of plague in the town was referred to as an ‘Unfortunate Occurrence’, but one not entirely unexpected. There was no mention of the girl’s parents, and her name wasn’t even published. The plague news from Sydney and Brisbane was more of a sensation, apparently.
The council had begun pouring more resources into sweeping the streets, fumigating sheds around the wharves, knocking on doors and inspecting sewers and back yards. The leaflets I’d composed and council had approved long ago were finally rolling off Willmett’s presses, more rats were being found and incinerated, ships fumigated and so much carbolic poured into drains that the dead fish were again piling up along the Strand and not even the Chinamen could bury them all this time.
‘The town might be clean,’ said Humphry, ‘but it smells like death.’
Like a heavily laden steamer, McCreedy walked with an easy rolling grace.
I was startled, though, that he had managed to appear in the centre of my office without my noticing.
‘Sit, sit,’ he said, looking about the room as if for the first time.
‘I was about to come to your office.’ I rummaged around my desk.
‘Couldn’t wait all day. Let’s get the damned thing over with now.’
He came over to the desk and picked up a framed photograph.
‘Your girl?’ he said.
‘My wife.’
‘I didn’t know you were married.’
He sat in the chair across from me and leaned back, resting hands like twin spiders on his belly.
‘Well, I suppose that’s that then. I suppose she must have plague if she’s in the plague hospital,’ but the Mayor didn’t seem to enjoy his own joke. ‘This serum for the plague. It works?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve had it?’
‘Of course.’
‘And it’s being given to mayors. Well, well, this must be serious.’
I prepared the syringe.
‘The captains,’ he rambled, ‘leaders of society and civilisation, people needed to keep the ship off the rocks. You follow me? Some don’t want it. I could name names. They don’t believe it’s plague at all.’
‘Mr Dawson?’
‘He’s just one.’
I took a teaspoon of yellow serum up into the syringe. Where was Dawson? He seemed to appear just before a disaster. I should be thankful I hadn’t seen him.
‘No point protecting yourself against something that doesn’t exist, I suppose,’ McCreedy was saying, and his hands did a little spidery dance on his stomach. ‘People aren’t always aware of what’s good for them.’
‘Please undo your trousers, Mr McCreedy.’
I didn’t give him the choice. The Mayor took his jab in the flab of skin above the hip, talking throughout.
Must hardly be a blasted rat left alive in the town, he was saying, the money being dished out to grubby boys for…ow…the bounty. And what were Turner’s intentions now? Was he still on about the blasted railway? He was here to scuttle it on Mr Philp’s orders, that’s what Dawson thought.
I said I didn’t know. I supposed I wasn’t a good spy.
McCreedy did up his trousers and collected his coat.
‘Dr Row, your future is very much tied up in this business, you follow me? You’re a servant of the town’s ratepayers, just as I am. They pay your salary, and it’s your job to protect them from blasted quacks.’
And the plague, I would have thought.
‘Turner’s anything but a quack. Zealous, perhaps,’ I said.
‘Well, just keep an eye on him. I’m relying on you to let me know if he has anything in mind that might jeopardise this town.’
He sailed off.
I sat. For some time. On a whim I fetched Gard’s bag from the cupboard. I stood it behind my desk in case someone came in, but all I could do was stare at it. And what if I did open it? What if I found something that somehow explained Mrs Gard’s death, the plague that seemed to have visited the entire Gard family? Wouldn’t I be even more culpable, by not having opened the thing in the first place when there was a chance to prevent it? There was a world of opportunities in the bag, but the time for them had passed and I couldn’t face knowing. I put the bag back and locked the cupboard and sat, waiting for something else to happen. My tooth was giving me a holiday. I hoped it was a good omen. I put my head on the table, but couldn’t sleep.
There’d been no sign of plague in Mrs Gard’s kidney and she was buried in the Presbyterian section of the West End cemetery. I didn’t attend. As it turned out, the Reverend Kerr and the undertaker were the only ones who did.
Turner had examined the woman’s child and said she had signs of anaemia, probably caused by leech worms in the bowels, which would complicate her recovery. He took a faecal sample for microscopic examination. I went back to Three Mile Creek and stayed there late in the evenings, risking my neck with a bicycle ride home in the dark.
It seemed for a few days that the child might be the first and last patient for the plague hospital, but the next Saturday the Bobby Towns returned from Picnic Bay with an English Church minister so delirious with fever that the people with him thought he was possessed.
He let go a stream of obscenities when Humphry examined him at the hospital, and as soon as plague was confirmed Bacot packed him off in the middle of the night to Three Mile Creek.
Humphry and Bacot had a falling out over this. The Reverend was a friend of Humphry’s and Bacot was probably just being his acid self.
I was more worried for the girl. The Reverend Ward in the condition Humphry described would be bad company for her.
This second case worried Turner more than the first.
The Gard child fitted neatly with Turner’s theories about overcrowding and filth. Her disease was more logical if we discounted the link to West Point, said Turner. There were rats in town with plague in their blood. The child was three and inhabited an unsanitary boarding house. Beneath the house flowed an open drain and there was barely room between the earth and the floorboards for a cat.
The Reverend Ward, though, had no business catching plague.
He lived in a clean house on Melton Hill. If he had any connection with infection it was an arm’s length one with his parishioners, and they should be the ones to succumb first.
When Turner had Humphry and me inspect the Bobby Towns, the rectory and the church, we found no rats, at least none we could catch. We laid baits, had the launch and church fumigated, and the parishioners who’d been at the picnic with him were told to report the first signs of fever. We didn’t quarantine or inoculate them because their contact was slight. It was unlikely they shared the minister’s mystery flea.
It was worrying.
So was my tooth. The ache came, and I swore I’d get it pulled, and then it went, and I found any excuse to put it off again.
‘Are you all right?’ Humphry and Turner would ask.
I was spending the evenings at the plague hospital, as was Humphry now. The fever kept the Reverend Ward blaspheming and the nurses sometimes had to cover their ears and flee the tent. On his hands, feet and face were many light red spots about the size of peas, which Routh insisted were mosquito bites.
While the Reverend burned, the girl hovered more peacefully between life and death. She would not die of plague, but she might well starve to death or one of her organs might give out.
Humphry and I sat one whole night beside our patients at opposite ends of the tent.
By this time, Turner had developed a set against Flinders-lane and now that he had two plague patients, he decided to act.
Chinatown was a place I had been ignoring as much as possible. It wasn’t somewhere I wanted to investigate, but Turner insisted it had to be disinfected, and one stuffy and overcast morning we gathered a small company of council workers and armed them with kerosene, matches, shovels, brooms and buckets of lime wash, rat poison, and sulphur.
We stood at the Denham-street end, literally a stone’s throw from the rear of the Town Hall and Post Office. I could see the closed and covered window of my office.
Turner gave a small speech.
Behind him was a jumble of rusty lean-tos. A greasy kind of smoke wafted down from corrugated-iron chimneys, drifting through the lane. A small muddy trench dug by a hand or a heel oozed grey water. There was little sign of life, except for a dog with three legs that limped carefully around the potholes away from us.
Turner said the lane was a possible source for infection. Did each man have his instructions and did he understand them?
There were a dozen workers dressed head to toe – in boots, white overalls, and hats – and they nodded as one. Each carried a white gauze mask and looked as though they might have come from the moon or the deep sea.
‘If you come across any person, please explain what you are doing and ask them politely to leave,’ said Turner. ‘If they protest, explain that under the Health Act the police have the power to force them to leave. If they put up any resistance, call for the police.’
