The Clay Dreaming (63 page)

‘Bit of hard going.’ The old man thrust his spade deep into the turned earth.

Lawrence could only agree.

‘Not enough rain to speak of,’ the digger observed, resting his arms across the handle. Stalled, clearly done for the time being, he tipped his cloth cap to the back of his head and surveyed the dappled skies.

Graveyards within central London long since filled to bursting, the earthly remains of Charles Rose – King Cole – were being interred in Victoria Park Cemetery, out towards the east beyond the slums of Bethnal Green.

Lawrence watched the wind stir the trees, crows hopping along their branches.

‘I dug this ground when it was brick field,’ said M’sieu Gravedigger, ‘and I dug it when it was market garden. I suppose that I s’ll carry on digging it now that it’s f’r plain burying folks.’ He adjusted the spade in the earth, saying, ‘Twelve and half acres ’ere…with more ’n’ a half million in ’em.’ 

The parson walked up, a tall and thin man all in black. He asked, ‘Just you, is it, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Lawrence. ‘Just me.’ Not meaning to exclude him from their exchange, he half-inclined his body towards the groundskeeper. ‘A sorry business,’ he said.

Staring awkwardly at his feet since the arrival of the priest, the digger appeared to take offence. He climbed up out of the freshly dug hole and, grumbling, took up his distance.

Lawrence’s gaze fell across the nearest in a line of three common deal coffins. The Surrey Cricket Club had kindly offered to cover costs, the funeral expenses anyway negligible: Cole was to be stacked in a pauper’s grave. There
was little need for ceremony without the team in attendance. Lawrence planned to rejoin them that same evening, so they might hear the sad news from him directly, before any newspaper should announce it.

His players suffered in their performance: they were homesick, as Miss Larkin had surmised. With morale already low, Cole’s passing could only depress matters further.

Sundown, like Cole, was
Wurdiboluc
– whether brother by blood or just some obscure relation, Lawrence had given up on puzzling their kinships: it might anyhow be prudent to send him home, sooner rather than later. Aboriginal grieving, in line with their unique beliefs, contained power sufficient to kill.

Lawrence observed the priest’s lips moving. ‘I’m sorry?’ he asked.

‘My part is done,’ the parson said. ‘I wondered if you wished to add anything.’

Lawrence rummaged in his pockets, pulling out notation for a short speech he had prepared: even with no audience, he owed Cole that much. Moving to the graveside, he stumbled slightly before finding surer footing.

‘Cricket,’ read Lawrence, ‘is full of glorious chances, and the goddess who presides over it loves to bring down the most skilful players.’

The priest, standing hard by, huffed slightly. Lawrence looked up, uncertain, before reading on.

‘A loyal comrade…no seeker of praise, here lies King Cole, the embodiment of Bush mateship. He stayed in for a considerable time, but the merry young soul was ultimately bowled.’

He had cribbed the closing sentiment from a recent match report, relating an occasion when Dick-a-Dick had worn Cole’s cap.

They lowered the coffin down.

It was over: one of his charges dead. Lawrence’s worst nightmare had been realised.

He took up a handful of earth, as directed.

‘“FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy”,’ intoned the priest, ‘“to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”’

Dirt pebble-dashed the cheap coffin’s lid.

‘“I HEARD a voice from heaven”,’ the priest resumed, ‘“saying unto me, Write…”’

Lawrence, looking down into his calloused palm, found it empty.

In a public bar along Bethnal Green High-street, not far from the burial ground, the team captain swallowed another swig of beer. He drank alone.

‘Lawrence is the black sheep,’ the papers jibed, ‘because he is white!’

Journeying alongside the Blacks had, he felt, led to the growth of his understanding of the world – or at least the limitations of mankind. In the innate decency of their natural character, his native players were so much more than savages, the naïve infants or even blanks they were so often mistaken for. The longer he spent in their company, the more he earned their respect; and they his. Familiarity bred contempt only for those who would denigrate such essential humanity, and continued so to do, almost every day.

It was no better in Australia.

Oh, surely they were rude and unmoulded – when not being mulish, over-generous to a fault. Yet a willingness to adapt and an eagerness to please were countermanded by their keeping the greater part of themselves remote. Even as events modified their more immediate environment, they cultivated an inner world, resolute and unchanging. What was perhaps a source of strength also proved their fatal weakness: they could only take so much, and then no more. Their character cast and fired in their disturbed imagination, any alteration too great threatened to shatter them completely.

As his dear colleague Hayman had said, it took time to know the Aboriginal character – longer, perhaps, to appreciate it. And time on the world’s stage was a luxury they were not afforded.

King Cole was laid in his grave, Lawrence’s high hopes with him.

‘Another,’ Lawrence said, placing a shilling on the bar. ‘Keep ’em coming.’

Neither the most skilful player nor the steadiest, even as Cole’s captain Lawrence couldn’t very well denounce the poor fellow in his elegy. The battered copy of
Tom Brown
lay on the sticky bar before him; he had pulled quotes, as he took so much else, from that book serving as his personal Bible. Within its curled pages, a fine balance was ever maintained between joy and pain, a man’s duty to himself and to others, and the will towards personal betterment – the very objects he had most lost sight of.

Taking up the book, Lawrence eyed the wise verse from
Ambarvalia
, by Clough, the Rugby poet, an epigraph heading the chapter ‘Tom Brown’s Last Match’. In search of guidance he began to flick back and forth through the pages, wherein so much of the text had been underlined, and margins annotated. His vaunted ambition – to make his living, while at the same time doing real good – had fallen to mere money-making. The tour turned a healthy profit for its investors. George Smith, financier, over from Sydney – cousin to George W. Graham, their accountant – intended to purchase stallion bloodstock for shipping home. William Hayman’s stake matured nicely. Lawrence himself was fourth in the concern. 

He paid for his silence only now. Meantime, they kept losing. Some losses were harder to bear.

‘“Derry down, then fill up your glass, he’s the best that drinks most.”’ Lawrence, well in his cups, motioned again to the barman. The Reverend Cotton’s ‘Cricket Song’ echoed and re-echoed. Lessons could be learnt from cricket, all right. Not all were of benefit.

Victoria had been Queen longer than Sarah had been alive. In 27 years as one of Her Imperial Majesty’s loyal subjects, she had known conquest, mutiny, epidemic, abolition, and countless wars – the country even coming close, once, to revolution – without ever really experiencing any of it.

Mother had died in 1854, shortly before Sarah’s thirteenth birthday; the past was never spoken of thereafter, current events at most vaguely discussed. Little to live for, save day-to-day business between these four walls. Hers had been the life of a nun – contemplation of life, not life itself.

Sarah was standing at the front window, as she had late into the night, in the parlour this time. Having gained her freedom, she little knew what it meant, or what to do with it. Unmarried, an only child, she could not assume the duties of sister-in-law or maiden aunt. She was effectively redundant; no innocent, but ignorant, an artless girl who had needed a modern-day Le Huron, the savage out of Voltaire’s
L’Ingénu
, to show to her the country in which she lived – a realm of ignorance and poverty, and, worst of all, willing ignorance of poverty: old England, sick and sad at heart.

The city, even unto its hospitals and churches, had become a nightmare scene. She looked in from outside of it – belonging nowhere in it.

Intimacy with the details of Druce’s tortured
Life
were not, on their own, necessary for her to have approached greater understanding: poverty respected neither class nor capability; not intellect, prudence, labour or health. There was nothing deserving at all in poverty – vice no singular promoter, nor, heaven knew, virtue any great defence.

Everyday trials and tribulations, the struggle for existence, brought down the tyranny of the Word. Religion was an irrelevance in the face of such suffering, just as she was – moral superiority, morals themselves, impossible to maintain, while the broad mass of people existed beyond reach of the gospel. 

Who more truly lived in denial? Who more truly lived? Living hand to mouth, by the hour, freed poor folk from the curse of intellect holding her in thrall. She might be better off unable to afford such torturing luxury, the time on her hands all her own. Or was this but the first, halting step in her uncertain decline – poverty, fear of poverty, her selfish regard, all rooted in the same spiritual sickness.

She must keep faith. The sheer effort it took to change one’s self might take many years, oceans even, but it was always possible to move forward.

Almost unconsciously, Sarah touched her hand against the cold window glass.

Not until that day Brippoki arrived on her doorstep had her own self awoken, from within as much as without. She would not allow her new life to be so soon over, now that he was gone.

Sarah dressed and took a turn around Russell-square, wandering, directionless. A wise heart rarely found in the house of mourning, she strove to restore her equilibrium.

She paused beneath the shade of a London plane tree,
Platanus X hispanic
a
, the most common of trees, planted widely throughout the city as it was the only kind to thrive in a polluted atmosphere. Plain as its name, it was not without aspects of beauty. By virtue of its mere existence the evil world was done some good.

She removed one of her gloves, to stroke the mottled bark’s rough surface.

Only a month since she had been to see him play in his first match at the Oval, and now he was dead and buried. She had known the appointed time, and she had known the appointed place; Captain Lawrence had been kind enough to make certain of that. Sarah preferred to honour Brippoki her own way – his way, most likely: in silent communion with nature. If she was wrong, he must forgive her. They had put Lambert Larkin in the ground on Tuesday, in Malling. She could not face a second funeral inside a single week.

Her goodbyes said privately, Sarah tried to picture Brippoki as she wished to remember him – seated atop One Tree Hill, beneath the elm.

She found herself picking at the bark. Friable, it came off in sizeable chunks. An area about the size of her fist was now exposed – the layer beneath, disclosed to the air, noticeably lighter in colour.

Sarah took a step back and, guilty for the injury, replaced her glove. Turning, she looked up, searching somewhere above the drifting clouds.

When we died, as in our dreams, we returned to the place that we came from.

‘Weep, weep.’

Heels grinding the gravel path, she spun about.

A childish giggle issued from among the highest branches of the tree; Sarah moved side to side, trying to see where. Taking a step or two further from the
trunk, she almost collided with a perambulator. Deep within the shifting leafshadows, and sufficiently high up, she could not make out the face, not even to determine the colour of his skin – but it appeared to be a boy of about eight years old. He could have been black but was more likely white, and filthy – a sweep’s boy, a small white child, sitting tall in a tree and laughing at her.

Much later, Sarah again occupied the front parlour, her chair pulled up close to the windows; no longer staring down into the street; content merely to look out occasionally, at the night skies.

She wondered if she could have helped Brippoki any better, now that he lay beyond all help – but if so, how? Lambert had always led her to despise the phrase ‘if only’: in a universe directed by God’s purposes, regrets were immoral.

Bitterness was futile, and twisted a life. Sarah thought, if anything, she should be grateful to Druce, and, yes, to Lambert, for the example they had set. Only in taking back the responsibility for her own life could she look down into the grave without bitterness.

Sarah’s fingers worked, turning over and over the small object in her hand.

Things her elders would call – had called – supernatural, primitive tribal societies accepted as part of the natural order, the intangible accredited with power to affect the tangible, and indelibly so. Ghosts, Holy or otherwise, achieved dynamism through the strength of their belief – beliefs making for reality.

Some sort of connection existed between Brippoki on the one hand and Druce on the other; she was not meant to know what it was, only to bear witness to the blood sacrifice, part of a ritual; living proof. Brippoki, gentle soul, had believed a vengeful spirit unleashed. His sensitivities had caused him no little distress and a very great fear: fear of a figment something like his personal Nemesis.