Wild Island (26 page)

‘Steady,
mon ami
. Not so very far in time,' said Lempriere.

‘I won't press the point,' Booth smiled. ‘Although it may seem to those of us still in the first flush of youth (cheers from Stuart) that
forty-one years
(cries of astonishment, more cheers) is an attainment of great venerableness and wisdom. You have gathered to yourself a lady of shining worth (hear! hear!) . . . a family of great . . .
exuberance
(laughter) . . . a position of honour in our little community and strong affection in our hearts. A man of science and the arts, equally excellent in learning and sensibility, whose multiple exertions on behalf of this colony are a matter of wonder: ladies and gentlemen, I give you Thomas Lempriere and his delightful spouse, the fair Charlotte.'

The toast was drunk amid table-thumping from Stuart until Charlotte begged him to desist in case the extensions should collapse under the dishes. Lempriere rose and thanked Booth for mentioning how much of his happiness lay in his family, his friends, his most welcome guests.

‘We should thank the Lord every day that “the lines have been laid to us in pleasant places” on this beautiful island . . .' he said. He spoke of the exciting duty of pursuing the study of natural history in this curious place. He referred to his youth, and asked for blessings on those dear to him in Hobarton and other parts of the world. He blew his nose and sat down. I glanced at Booth, expecting to see a smile for this display of sentiment, and was surprised to catch on the Commandant's face a wave of similar feeling.

A distribution of plum pies and crumb tarts revived the conversation until Charlotte Lempriere gave the signal for the ladies to retire. Having shown us the offices and the tiny parlour, she excused herself to attend to the baby. I had wondered if Anna would be tired by the evening, but although she was quiet she seemed happy. Augusta Drewitt, pursing her lips at herself in a wall mirror, began to put drops from a tiny vial into her eyes. ‘Belladonna. For sparkle, you know. Do you never use it?'

Anna and I watched as she dropped the poison into her eyes.

‘Rouge is quite
passé
in London, worse luck,' she went on. ‘I always think I need a little colour, but one looks a superannuated fright if one wears it now. Do you think Captain Booth the more handsome, or Lieutenant Stuart, or Mr Bergman?'

She went on without pausing, ‘Bergman has had a convict mistress five years. He has a son by her and is much attached to them, apparently. He is wealthy but a Jewish, of course. I wonder why Captain Booth has never married? He is thirty-seven, you know, and must have means. I should hardly wish to marry out here, in any case.'

She moved to the cottage piano, plinked a few chords and began turning sheets of music.

‘Will you play, Mrs Adair? Mrs Rochester? Or shall I? ‘

She launched into an
écossaise
. Anna sat by the fire slowly turning the pages of an album of engravings:
Picturesque Scenes of England and Wales.
Exactly the kind of prints I had hand-coloured for a few pence each, in that winter after Tom died. Nina and I were so poor I might have stolen a loaf or a piece of blanket if I'd not had that work. I went to the window, held the curtain aside and stood looking down the dark slope to the sentry box with its soft lamplight, wondering whether the prisoners could hear the piano. Miss Drewitt lost her place and came to an abrupt halt. In the sudden silence it seemed to my imagination that the frail music had been vanquished by the strangeness of the thickly treed hills and the water lapping its own song into that cove since the beginning of time. Miss Drewitt recovered and plinked on. I wondered what Mr Bergman's mistress was like, and what she had done to deserve transportation.

When the gentlemen came in, the parlour grew crowded. Lempriere was saying to Stuart, ‘But the pursuit of the sciences cuts across every boundary of country and race. Napoleon's armies had orders to let Sir Humphry Davy and the young Faraday pass through the battle lines . . .'

A high young voice called in triumph from the doorway, ‘Papa knows, don't you, Papa? Papa was a spy!'

A small girl appeared. She wore a white nightgown and clasped a thick red counterpane around her shoulders that trailed behind her.

‘Mary!' said Lempriere. ‘
Qu'est-ce que tu fais?
Where is Miss Wood?'

‘She is sitting in a chair making noises, Papa. I think she is ill.'

Mary came up to Bergman and said, ‘The others are asleep but I cannot sleep.' She turned to Booth. ‘I have made some paintings with the colour-box you gave me. Could I ride Jack tomorrow?'

Booth smoothed her hair. ‘We'll have to see what your mama says,' he answered smiling. He chose a custard tart from a dish on the table. ‘One of these and then you must go back to bed.'

‘You spoil her, Booth,' said Lempriere.

There was a knock on the door and a thick shout of ‘Mary?' A woman came in. She was at the petticoat-and-stays part of undress
and had thrown over the top a voluminous brown shawl. A white cotton cap, strings hanging loose, was crammed over hair partly in curl papers. She had been drinking.

‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,' she said in tones of slurred politeness. ‘Come, Miss Mary!' And descending into a whimper, ‘Now come along, do!'

The governess subsided into tears, and followed Charlotte Lempriere out with Mary, snuffling into a large handkerchief. An odd intrusion, a reminder of what I might have been, might still have to be. The conversation resumed slowly.

‘Settlers like Gregson and Fenn Kemp won't stop until they get a voice in Government,' said Stuart.

‘Well, I don't know how they'll do it,' said Booth. He yawned. ‘Oh, excuse me! Life is too short. I'd rather spend time building jetties and dining with friends.'

‘“The summer of a dormouse,”' said Bergman smiling. ‘Do you remember what Byron says? “When one subtracts from life infancy, which is vegetation—and sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”'

Lempriere brought out a violin. We must try a Mendelssohn song for two voices he had sent for. Bergman sang the low part, playing it on the violin at the same time, Augusta was soprano and I accompanied on the piano, managing the lovely little piece with some false notes and laughter. Lempriere, deeply affected by the music, seized his trumpet when we finished, vowing to play a dirge for those in peril on the sea. It was after midnight now, and Charlotte reminded him of the children already abed.

‘Only softly,
ma chère
,' he said, taking up her hand and kissing it. But he put the trumpet aside and the evening came to an end.

We stayed five more days waiting for the
Vansittart
's return. The next day I accompanied the party that conveyed Augusta Drewitt
along the four-mile track to Wedge Bay. Anna was content to sit in Charlotte Lempriere's kitchen playing with the family's collection of curious pets, among them a wombat which slept in her lap like a fat little bear, and a tame orphan kangaroo or joey, whose pouch was a canvas bag hanging from the doorknob. It dived in head first, leaving its long back legs poking out like a bundle of sticks.

Charlotte kindly supplied me with a pair of thick cotton duck trousers and a short canvas skirt, and we set off on the narrow road through the dense forest. Augusta rode Jack. I was pleased to stretch my legs. Two convicts pulled a small cart carrying Augusta's luggage, Bergman's box of surveying chain—the ‘Gunter's' chain—and sacks of flour and sugar rations. The track was black sand netted with root fibres, boggy in places. My new boots were soon unrecognisable. The weather was perfect for walking: a brilliant autumn day.

Bergman and Booth explained as we went the difficulties of the ‘chain and compass' method of surveying. By stretching the ‘Gunter's' chain along the land to determine length; and using a circumferentor, or tripod-mounted compass, for direction; and a theodolyte, the world could be divided up with imaginary lines. But in practice, when the land was not flat and clear, the readings were part guesswork, and errors were common in the surveying done during the early years of the colony. ‘Triangulation' was a better method, but it used sextant readings, and therefore needed cairns on hilltops for the sightings. These were expensive and laborious to build, and Whitehall had stopped the money for them, forcing Sir John Franklin to order a return to the old method.

Wedge Bay proved to be an exquisite curve of long white beach with rocky outcrops each end. A whale-shaped island lay in the distance offshore, humped at one end, tapering away to the sea at the other. Two tiny huts formed the outstation, with neat garden beds around them, and a track behind leading to the signal on top of the ridge. Augusta's sister, Evie, and Evie's husband, Sergeant William Wade, were a pleasant couple, plainly happy with each other and their resourceful life. They made tea in a billycan over the fire outside,
the baby being asleep indoors, and we shared the ‘scran' Power had given us: bread, cold meat and cake. When the men climbed to the signal, I left Augusta and her sister unpacking and walked down to the shore to sketch.

After a time, Bergman joined me and looked at my drawing.

‘Your line is skilful and accurate,' he said, ‘but you also manage to convey the scale of the scene, the sense of this landscape extending beyond . . .'

I told him that in France, when I was young, I had seen two works by Madame Vallayer-Coster which perfectly captured this effect for me and made me strive to achieve it.

‘Curiously, these were not landscapes but still lives,' I added. ‘“Still Life with Parrot and the Fruits of Summer”, and “Still Life with Bird in a Gilded Cage”. Quiet interior scenes—and yet the painter had imbued her work with a mysterious light which made you imagine a window just outside the edge of the canvas, and beyond it the orchards and vineyards where this fruit grew—and even beyond that, the distant lands where parrots live.'

Each grape seemed a little green world you were inspired to wonder at, to see how astonishing it is that such things should exist at all, even though we take them for granted every day. A half-peeled lemon suggested some invisible human hand—and there were roses, in bud and full-blown, others already dropping petals.

‘An allegory of our brief lives?'

‘Yes, but more than that, too. I felt the painter wanted us to think of the glorious breadth of the world and our little knowledge of it,' I said. ‘I thought she herself might be a prisoner, like the birds she painted; in exile like them and yearning to go home, and yet acknowledging the beauty of her enforced surroundings.'

I had desperately wanted to buy one of those paintings. My father had given me a generous amount of wedding money, but Tom had taken charge of it and he did not care for them. A pang of unwanted knowledge had come to me at that moment. I suddenly knew I was
less free as a wife than I had been as a daughter. Even gifts to me, even my earnings, belonged by law to my husband.

I did not tell Bergman this. It seemed a too-intimate and distorted glimpse of my life with Tom. For a time we had been happy together.

Bergman and I walked along the sands as we talked, picking up little orange crab-shells so perfect they looked alive, but they were empty, hollow and light. There were myriad shells: whorled, bone-white skeletons, and whole, perfect ones, barred and patterned; tiny fluted scallop shells on which a miniature Venus might have risen from the sea—and feathers, and brown sea-wrack with dark pods to pop between the fingers. Everything smelled of brine; the water had the hard sparkling blue of autumn.

When Charlotte asked me later what I thought of the place, I said I found it beautiful, which was true: the tall straight gums in their subtle colours, the glorious hills and sea. But I did not like to say that it seemed to me a strange, cruel kind of beauty, charged with a quality I could not name, but which felt profoundly alien to me. Some little nuts and seed-pods Bergman collected for me seemed emblems of this, each one an exquisite, sharp, dry little puzzle, the geometry of a different world—only understandable, perhaps, to the people so savagely exiled from it. I found myself thinking how wrong a word like ‘meadow' sounded in this colony.