The Lieutenant Part 11

Rooke watched him write, thinking of his own threadbare notes in his own small book. How might he begin the task of telling Silk about what had been happening on the point?

'And what have you been up to, Rooke?' Silk asked at last. 'Has there been anything of note to report?'

Silk was hardly waiting for an answer, he was so sure there had been nothing of note to report.

'Well,' Rooke began.

He must tell, otherwise what up till now had been simply private would take on the dangerous power of a secret. The task was to tell, but to minimise. To reveal, but reveal something so small and so dull that Silk would not pause to examine it.

But while he was a.s.sembling words and rejecting them, Silk was fiddling with the things on the table, and came across the blue notebooks, insufficiently hidden under Montaigne.

'Grammatical Forms of the Language of N.S. Wales,' he read. 'Why, look here, I believe you have been making a study of the native tongue. Oh, and Vocabulary of N.S. Wales. May I...?'

He had his thumbs ready to spread open one of the little books, only his unfailing courtesy demanding he go through the motions of asking permission. Rooke cursed himself for not hiding them properly. With Gardiner and Silk both gone, and no other visitors from the settlement likely, he had forgotten to be careful. He realised he had never pictured another eye looking at the words he had written, and could not think quickly enough how to say, No, Silk, do not open it.

'I think you will find not much of interest,' he said. 'My researches are, you know, in a very preliminary... Were there natives at Rose Hill? Any encounters?'

For a moment he thought the ruse had worked.

'Why yes, I had almost forgot to tell you,' Silk said, putting the book down, although keeping his hand on it. 'While I was there a hut was burned to the ground, luckily empty. Some time later a man out hoeing ground was attacked, a spear in fact pierced the ground between his feet, but by good fortune he was not struck.'

Rooke watched Silk's thumb absently stroking the edge of the book, where the blue cloth was worn.

'There is trouble brewing, is my feeling, but what to do when the attackers will not let themselves be seen? The governor plans to send another ten men and one of the small cannons. The Rose Hill redoubt is superbly positioned. A dozen men could fight off any force of natives.'

Rooke had hoped for a diversion, but had not expected this. The small dramas taking place in his hut had filled his horizon. Out in the greater world of His Majesty's penal settlement, it was apparent that other sorts of events were beginning to rumble, and his ignorance was dangerous.

While he was talking, Silk had again picked up the book and seemed to feel he had sufficient permission to open it.

'Ah yes, I have this myself, if you remember. See this here, budyeri, my spelling differs from yours, but the word is clearly the same. And look, here is bial, meaning no, although I felt that a double e made the p.r.o.nunciation less open to error. But look at all these pages! My word, Rooke, you have had your nose to the grindstone.'

Rooke reached for the book, but Silk was still turning through the pages and would not yield it.

'No, Rooke, there is no need to be modest, this is a considerable achievement. You must learn not to hide your light under a bushel, my friend!'

He leaned back, closing the book on his finger but keeping a grip on it. Rooke told himself that his unhappiness at Silk reading his notes was a remnant of all the other idiosyncrasies which he had to conquer. He would have to accept that privacy was a luxury his life did not offer. If his time of being alone with the natives had come to an end, he supposed he must accept it gracefully.

'You know, do you not,' Silk said, 'that I was hoping to have a chapter on the language in my narrative?'

Perhaps his tone was more challenging than he had intended, and he followed it up with a somewhat windy laugh.

'May I ask what you are planning to do with these Grammatical Forms? Will you publish?'

Silk was moving too fast for Rooke.

'Publish? Publish this?'

'Well, in that way your labours would find a wider audience, would they not?'

How different Silk was from himself, Rooke thought. Silk could imagine no use for words other than reaching an audience. Why would a man labour, if not to publish? Until recently he himself would have viewed things the same way. Would have leapt at the idea of his endeavours having a public readers.h.i.+p.

In deciding to learn the language of the natives, he had thought to take a single step: to write down the words. Now he saw how far he had travelled from the world he once shared with Silk. Tagaran seemed to have led the way down some other road altogether.

'There may be some interest. Among scholars. Who might collect the languages of far-flung tribes. Publish-I do not, I would not think, I fear there may not be an extensive number. Of readers.'

He saw something in Silk relax, as if he had succeeded in getting a dead weight up to the top of a slope and could let gravity do the rest.

'Absolutely, Rooke,' he said. 'I have to concur. Probably not of much general interest. And my grief is that I have so little of the language here, in part because of my sojourn at Rose Hill. I am as it were thinking aloud here, you realise.'

He hesitated, but Rooke wondered whether the hesitation was merely a piece of theatre.

'It occurs to me, Rooke,' Silk said, as if just arriving at the thought, 'it occurs to me that we might be able to enter into a partners.h.i.+p, you and I. What say you add your vocabularies and your grammatical forms to my own journal-with full credit to you, naturally-in the form of an appendix?'

He did not wait for Rooke to reply but hurried on.

'Needless to say, you would share what Mr Debrett has promised me-we can come to some arrangement as to that-a proportion of the amount on a pro rata basis.'

He paused. Rooke could only think of one word: No! but said nothing. Silk hurried on.

'By which I mean of course that if, say, your contribution, in terms of numbers of pages, was a sixteenth of the whole, then you would have one sixteenth of the profit...what do you say, my friend?'

'Yes, well, I know what pro rata means, Silk, thank you.'

'Why, Rooke!' Silk's jocularity was a little forced. 'Are you haggling with me? Believe me, we will come to an arrangement that will suit you. You will get a fair share, you may be sure of that.'

Something in Rooke caught alight the way a twist of tinder did, a quick white flare.

'It is not about my share, Silk! I am not haggling with you over the pounds, s.h.i.+llings and pence!'

Those two notebooks recorded the best of his life. Perhaps he would be obliged to share them, but they would never be a matter of profit.

Silk was leaning forward across the table watching Rooke's face. Just as he had on the day he had wanted to know about Gardiner, Silk was catching a whiff of something hidden.

'Well, there may not be enough,' Rooke said. 'To show. In the end. Let us wait and see. Shall we?'

He reached over the table for the books and got one, but Silk was leafing through the other.

'I will hold you to that, Rooke,' he said absently, and Rooke thought, Hold me to what? I have promised nothing. Silk turned another page, and Rooke saw his narrow face quicken with surprise.

'Tya-something or other...Go on Rooke, what is it?'

Rooke could not do other than oblige.

'Tyerabarrbowaryaou.'

'Thank you, and here is the meaning: I shall not become white. This was said by Tagra...' He stumbled on the name, tried again. 'Tagaran-after I told her if she washed herself she would become white, at the same time throwing down the towel as in despair. Such a sad little picture, Rooke. Surely it was cruel to make her such a promise?'

'No, no, it was spoke in jest! Both, we both spoke in jest. It was a joke. That the white people think their skin superior...'

The white people. He was speaking as if he were not one of them.

'It was spoke in jest,' he said again, but heard the hopelessness in his voice. 'She is a clever child, she is not so silly as to believe...We enjoyed the joke of it.'

He had written as in despair in order to indicate that her despair was feigned. To him it had obviously been a joke. What native, even a child, would believe that was.h.i.+ng would make them white? He had failed to record the joke on the page, in the same way he failed to note that they were breathing, or that their hearts were beating.

Silk was not listening.

'My word, Rooke, you have certainly made considerable headway, and perhaps not only with grammatical forms!' He held the book to the light from the window and read. '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 desired her to put on clothes.'

It was his own arrogance as a man of science to have so precisely written down every detail of that small event so charged with delicate feeling. Stupidity, too, to have carefully formed every letter in his clear hand, so any eye in the world could read it.

'A child, you say? I hesitate to contradict you, my friend, but listen to this: Wana something-or-other, you will not have me, you don't want my company? This must be you, Rooke, and here is the answer: Wana-something-or-other else, I don't desire your company.'

His animated face was full of surprise, admiration and-could it be?-something like envy.

'My word, but you are ahead of the rest of us here. Are Mrs Butcher's beauties not enough for you? What a sly dog you are!'

A sly dog? Rooke did not know what Silk could be talking about, and then he did. He heard the words again in Silk's voice, had a picture of Tagaran-some leering, grotesque Tagaran-flaunting herself at him. He felt himself flus.h.i.+ng, a wave of heat that rose from his neck into his face, his ears, his scalp.

'No! No, no!'

Silk smiled, watching him with an inviting quirk of the eyebrow. The story was almost visibly forming about him: Our quiet friend Mr Rooke and his little friend Tagaran.

Calm, Rooke told himself. Calm at all costs, or the story would be graven in stone.

'No, no, you misunderstand. What you read there. She was not speaking to me but to another child.' In trying to be casual, his voice had become husky. 'Some of them come now and then. To beg food from me. And so on.'

This was surely dull enough, and not even a lie.

'I myself had no part in the exchange other than recording it. They were having an argument. One was going off. In a huff. But came back later.'

He was explaining too much. Silk was watching, smiling, his legs crossed, jerking one knee up and down so his foot bounced, waiting for silence to do its job.

'One of them has proved herself to be an excellent tutor of the language.'

One of them. It was to protect Tagaran, but it was a betrayal. Tagaran was not one of any of them. She was herself, unique in every particle.

'My dear Rooke,' Silk said at his most urbane, 'there is no need to explain. We are both men of the world.'

Men of the world! If he had been a man of the world he would have seen how those words could be read. A man of the world would never have been so fatally innocent as to write them down.

In Silk's mind there could be no intimacy with a native girl that was not physical. And how can I hope to persuade him otherwise, Rooke thought, when I myself do not understand and have no word for that intimacy?

I should have known, he cursed himself. Should have remembered his nose for a secret.

He had lived in that place that seemed so different as to be inviolable. He had drifted along without time or s.p.a.ce or consequence. Everything had been suspended while he and Tagaran floated in some corner of the cosmos in which the impossible could unfold. Now the iron laws of time and place were a.s.serting themselves.

Not speaking had made things worse. He could see that now. Made it look furtive, when there was nothing to hide.

'They have an artless charm, the girls, I grant you,' Silk said. 'And an admirable lack of coquetry. But Rooke, as a friend, might I just utter a word of warning? Hidden away out here, you may not be completely aware, well, the natives are-let me put it this way, the governor is concerned. Those attacks at Rose Hill...You might think to go a little carefully.'

'Thank you, Silk,' Rooke said. 'It is kind of you to speak as a friend.'

Kind, but what could Silk know, reading his words through a lens of prurience, and making guesses that were so wrong as to be sickening?

He took the notebooks from Silk, got up and put them away on the shelf. Once up there between Lacaille's Stelliferum and the Nautical Almanac, they were invisible. So small, like the first snag in a stocking, that could hardly be detected, that seemed not to have any importance. By the time the snag had unravelled the whole thing, it was too late to mend.

The earth travelled elegantly along its...o...b..t, tilted on its axis-somewhat like the governor, Rooke thought-bearing the settlement into the full heat of summer. A week had pa.s.sed since his meeting with Silk, but something in Rooke was still reverberating, a disturbance in the air, a tremor in his sense of himself.

He heard them before he saw them-Kamara! Kamara!-Tagaran with Tugear and Worogan, almost falling down the rocks in their haste to reach the hut. No one else, none of the women, none of the other children. Just these three, landing at his door in the afternoon, breathless and crying.

'Heavens, what has happened, what is wrong?'

Tagaran was in disarray as he had never seen her, her face wet with tears, her mouth shaking, air heaving raggedly in and out. She was trembling like a horse after a gallop. He saw brilliant red blood on her arm and her side.

She panted out a stream of words, he could not understand a single one.

'Get in, girls, get in by the fire!'

He spread a blanket for them to sit on, threw sticks on the fire. He had little enough in the hut, but poured them each a cup of water, found the hard old slab of biscuit that was to have been his meagre supper and gave them each a piece, leaving himself a mouthful. Tugear was sobbing, would not taste the water or the biscuit, sat with her knees up to her shoulders.

Tagaran took a deep breath to try to calm her breathing and was racked by an enormous hiccough, then another. She smiled crookedly and started to say something, hiccoughed again, and all at once the crisis was over, Tugear laughing and banging Tagaran on the back until she angled her elbow up to make her stop.

'Now tell me, girls. What has happened? What is this about?'

Tugear and Worogan looked at Tagaran. She spoke, but too fast. He caught white man, all the rest was a blur.

'I cannot understand you,' he said. 'Mapiadyimi.'

'Piyidyangala whitemana ngalari Tugearna,' Tagaran repeated, one word at a time for his benefit.

In piyidyangala Rooke could hear a stem he knew, piyi to beat. Even as his brain was computing the meaning, his heart was shrinking. A white man beat Tugear. He did not have to unravel all the implications of this to know that it was something he did not want to hear.

Tagaran was energetically acting out an angry face, a hand rising and falling. He could see it all, only too clearly, some outraged marine or truculent convict. For a moment he saw Brugden's powerful shoulders, imagined his arm bent back to strike.

She showed him how the beating had opened a long cut on her arm and hurt her finger, showed him the long stick-shaped weal where blood was beading on Tugear's back. She turned her face up to him, full of pain and outrage.

He cradled her hand in his own and looked at it, bent the finger gently and watched her face. It was not broken, but it was swollen. He picked up her other hand, comparing the swollen finger with the other. He went carefully so he would not touch the injured part, but she pulled back.

'Didyi didyi!'

There was an accusing note to her voice, although he could not have caused her pain.

He leaned forward to have a better look at the cut on Tugear's back, but she flinched in fear. Her face was turned away.

'Minyin barakut, Tugear, minyin?' he said, why are you afraid, Tugear?

Without looking at him she muttered, 'Mullayin.' Because of the men.