Little George Bettany sat in his chair and watched as the servant examined his mother, and then with fathomless eyes turned to me, the unworthy husband.
‘I have senna in the kitchen. I might make up a tincture of it for Mrs Bettany.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, exercising the creaky authority of the would-be paterfamilias.
‘Mama!’ said George, four-square in his infant boots and pantaloons and vest.
‘Mama is sick,’ murmured Bernard.
‘But not for long, my darling,’ Phoebe told him.
I went out in the raging afternoon towards Tume’s lively kitchen. She had an eight-year-old boy, a reliable fellow named Michael, who had been involuntarily transported with his mother and whom I thought of as one of my future stockmen. I asked if I could borrow Michael to entertain little George, who clearly much admired the older boy. This child Michael was barefooted, and wore dungarees and an old shirt which had once belonged to someone much larger than he. A woollen jerkin was his only protection against the deepening winter’s day. Though he had apparently been born in Ireland, he was the characteristic bush urchin, and every Celtic intonation had been bleached from his tongue. Michael suggested then in his New South Wales drawl that he carry a suitably coated George into the woolshed to play for the hour or so of light which was left. It was far too cold and blustery outside, but inside the shed was a large room, the tops of the walls lined with wool sacks, where men ate during the shearing or at the end of long musters. Here Clancy had made a little enclosure with wooden toys inside it, horses, cattle and a camel, and the sight of them always excited and diverted George.
Michael came with me back to the house, where by now Bernard had my wife’s pale, neat feet in a basin of hot water to which English mustard powder had been added.
‘I’ve put a warming pan in her bed,’ Bernard told me. Such implements were some of the refinements Phoebe had brought to us soon after our marriage.
‘Look after George,’ I said to Michael with confidence, as I buttoned my son into a kangaroo hide coat one of the men had run up for him. ‘No playing outside, not today, do you understand?’
‘That’s jake, Mr Bett’ny,’ said Michael.
George, who at this stage could barely walk but who insisted on tottering rather than being carried, was wriggling inside his jacket with the prospect of being pick-a-backed down to the woolshed by this older boy. But to be sure, I held his forehead for a long time before I let him go. I held his pulse, and pressed his collarbones and the base of his neck, and none of that seemed to cause him any pain.
‘No, no,’ he told me as I fussed. For he was ready to go. I kissed him for the man he would become.
So Phoebe was helped to her room by Bernard, and when she was in place, in nightdress and shawl, with the wind playing the timbers and rattling the darkening window pane, I went in and began reading to her a new book of Carlyle’s, Sartor Resartus, a study of the amusing Professor Teufelsdröckh and his absurd remarks on fashion.
As I read I could tell that Pheoebe was less and less comfortable, and I asked her how she was. ‘I have a sore throat,’ she said, ‘and feel veryill.’ At that second, percipiently, Bernard lifted a basin from a bedside table and placed it in front of my wife. Soured tea and a concoction of senna burst from Phoebe’s mouth. The combination of Phoebe’s pain and Bernard’s competence, the sisterhood between the two women, the hale Bernard and racked Phoebe, was a torment. In confusion I moved in and held Phoebe’s wrist as the violence of the thing passed. Bernard said, ‘You’ll be fine and on top of matters in a day or so, Mrs Bettany.’ Her eyes turned to me, full of profound, liquid confidence. Then she swayed off to her work in the kitchen as I reread the opening sentences, and I had perhaps not read more than a page when Phoebe went into an uneasy sleep.
I placed great reliance in what Bernard had said: Phoebe would be soon on top of matters.
George returned on Michael’s back, his cheeks red and his eyes alight. I let Michael stay and look through my bound volumes of illustrated papers, with George propped beside him in a chair. As Michael turned a page and uttered the name of what was illustrated on that page, George would repeat the word. ‘Look, a ship,’ Michael would say. ‘Sip,’ George would reverently echo.
Later, Bernard put George to bed in the second room, where she would also sleep overnight.
At some stage I woke at Phoebe’s side while she was suffering another paroxysm, which I attended to. ‘I am so ill,’ she said, uncharacteristically.
‘Bernard says you will be on top of matters in a day or so,’ I said to comfort her and myself.
‘Bernard doesn’t know everything,’ Phoebe told me.
Indeed, Phoebe’s extreme pallor concerned me. She seemed almost luminous in the dark, and I heard the traducing wind hungry at our walls, gnawing the daub from every seam. I felt terror for Phoebe, and for the solidity of my world. In my flawed mind, I wondered if I had somehow whistled up my wife’s illness.
‘Tomorrow I shall ride to Cooma to fetch Dr Alladair,’ I promised Phoebe.
She held my wrist. ‘Send a man, and stay with me.’
The next morning, with Phoebe still pallid and weak, I visited Long’s hut, as if on normal business. The air was blowing sleet and the mountains were lost in a turbulence of snow clouds. Long seemed faintly confused to be asked to ride on an errand any other of my convict hands could have undertaken. He too had a fear – that I had changed.
I decided that Tume’s son Michael would again keep George company in the house. Felix, who had been exhausted by the ride across the alps and woke late, also joined the children, and showed them pictures and maps, with the gentle expository skill of a born teacher. Bernard would need to cook, to change and bath George when necessary, and above all to bring her air of certainty to Phoebe’s bedside. The boys could entertain themselves with a ball of jute I gave them to throw to each other, as much stationery as they wanted to make lines on with pencils, and further access to my library. In between stoking the fire, which sucked down the angry air from outside and blazed merrily, I would occasionally cross to my son and feel his brow, for what that exercise was worth.
Phoebe herself was, I was happy to find, cool, even icy to the touch. The climate without and not the fever within had influenced her, and I thought it a good sign.
The big-boned Scotsman Alladair, who had attended George’s birth, arrived in mid-afternoon. He added his air of competence to that of Bernard, so that one did not believe anything bad could be permitted to happen to his patient. ‘You must compose yourself, dear fellow,’ he told me. ‘It is – whatever it is – not bubonic plague you know.’ He felt the glands beneath Phoebe’s jaw, and inspected her throat. Was she still nauseated? No, I was pleased to hear her say, but she felt very weak. He smiled at me across the room as he felt her pulse. ‘Fortunately frailty itself is not a fatal sign,’ he told Phoebe through me.
He suggested more senna mixture, and rest. Since he had ridden all the way from Cooma, I asked him to look at my son, whom he described as being in ‘rude bush health’.
So Doctor Alladair cheerily drove off home again in a dusk hard as steel.
When I woke late that night and lit a lamp, I found my wife convulsing. First senna and then quantities of bile came up her throat. She lay back so exhausted that she could not speak of it. ‘My love,’ I said, kissing her hands. ‘Rest and don’t succumb.’
I cursed Dr Alladair for making too rosy a judgement. I would have to fetch him back. I comforted Phoebe and slept fitfully. Bernard nudged me awake at dawn. My son was convulsing as his mother had. I sent Presscart out to summons Alladair – I might have gone myself, to ease anxiety with action, but George was calling for me. I felt his pulse and it was very irregular. They had both developed a racking cough and mucus rose up their throats.
Through all that horrible forenoon, Bernard went from one to the other, placing hot cloths on their foreheads. This was not the normal pattern of fever – it was not a
matter of the vital spark raging and consuming itself. It was a matter of it sinking down into dim iciness. Bernard and I moved the boy’s bed into his mother’s room, and Bernard filled the space with the warm and comforting smell of camphor and hot water. Alladair rode up at one o’clock in the afternoon. Good Presscart had got the man here, and on fast horseback rather than by carriage, in rather better time than I had hoped. Alladair briefly warmed his meaty hands at the fire before touching Phoebe and George, and then Bernard supported Phoebe to allow the doctor to looked down her throat. Gravely, he then moved to my whimpering son, and I supported George in my arms as Alladair performed the same examinations.
I was appalled by his sombre look as he leaned on the lump of hewn cedar which made our mantlepiece.
‘Do you have any rum?’ he asked.
I said we did. I went and fetched it and poured him a glass mixed with water. It was a day for it, and obviously, from his face, it was a day for worse things as well.
‘Their heads should be shaven at once. Could your housekeeper manage it? That is important. It diminishes the spread of the fever. Yesterday there were no signs in your wife’s throat. Now I can see the appearance of a membrane. It resembles white of egg.’
‘And … what is it?’
‘Your wife and son have the infection named diphtheria. The membrane will attempt to cast itself over the soft palate, the uvula, the pharynx and larynx. Have you noticed both their eyes are squinting – that is a symptom. Some of what your son is regurgitating comes through his nose. That too is characteristic. They will both grow delirious, but we must hope for the best. In delirium, they should have cold compresses on their forehead. I believe the woman has been using hot ones. That should discontinue. We must depend on the youth and strength of your wife and of your son. They are in God’s hands now.’
I felt a surge of anger. ‘You mentioned “rude bush health”.’
‘Yes, I was guilty of rashness. It was true yesterday. It is not true today. There is no earthly force I could have applied to prevent the development of that coating on the throat.’
‘You tell me … you tell me, do you? … we must wait to see if this growing membrane strangles my wife and son?’
‘Don’t dwell on that, dear fellow. We must rely on the inherent strength of the two sufferers, and on the mercy of God.’
‘God was not mentioned yesterday, sir!’ I said. ‘It seems that He only achieves a mention when the surgeon is bewildered.’
‘You’re probably right about that,’ said the tolerant doctor, draining his rum. ‘I shall leave doses of calomel. This is a disease which takes days or even weeks to develop, so I shall be back here the morning after next. Stockmen and their families should not come to this house, and I must inspect yourself and the housekeeper.’
I remembered to tell him that Felix and Michael had been close to George. He declared that Bernard and I showed no signs, but that we should stay in isolation around the homestead until the fever had run its course and not have close contact with any other person on Nugan Ganway. I thought I heard then, high at the apex of the wind, the laughter of ironic gods who had given me my perverse desire, to be locked away with Bernard.
Thus began a dreadful fortnight. Somewhere beyond our walls, like life on another continent, my affairs were run by Long – pastures patrolled in search of frost-blasted sheep, a steer run down and slaughtered for meat, carpentry attended to by Presscart and Clancy, rations drawn by Long and cooked by Tume. On some days I could hear Tume’s barefoot lad, Michael, out there, as he leapt, sang and freely breathed. Felix, whom I would have loved to greet, did not come to read his Latin texts or Greek primers.
And what Alladair called ‘the characteristic membrane’ grew apace in George’s throat, a force so small that the idea it could not be thwarted and prevented brought me hourly closer and closer to madness. My son and dear Phoebe were often in a simultaneous delirium. Phoebe cried that she was drowning in glacial Lake Geneva, raving as, in her perception, she went down. No stockmen visited Bernard in the outer kitchen, she cooked solid food only for herself and me, and broths and light junkets to be routinely regurgitated by Phoebe and George. Bernard asked me, her large, limpid, darkling eyes possessed by an unfeigned concern, ‘Do you think if we could find some arrowroot it might stay down?’ Alladair was back, humble as a monk, concerned, and abandoning by this time references to the Divine Will.
George suffered choking anguish as he cried to me – all the ships and bridges and dukes and soldiers Michael had pointed out to him in the pages of the illustrated papers were crushing in on him. I wept and howled with him, and Bernard said, ‘Sir, I must get you a dram.’
In the mornings, when Phoebe’s head was generally clearer, she would ask, ‘How is George?’ I would tell her that he was well. But the boy was losing even his infant power to communicate. He lay in torpor, profoundly sunk in his bed. On his fourth visit, Alladair insisted on staying. I let him have the ottoman in the living room. By candlelight I watched the flecks of white foam in the corners of Phoebe’s perfect mouth. Dr Alladair had given her perhaps too much calomel, and she was salivating, weakly working the lips, and I rose quickly to feed her teaspoonfuls of water and then went back to the chair, which I straddled backwards, my elbows on its straight back, above my son. On my awkward roost, I fell profoundly asleep. I dreamt of Bernard with her hair lasciviously undone bringing me scones to eat. For the moment of the dream I managed to feign indifference, but I said to myself, ‘It will be harder to do in Nugan Ganway than in this dream.’
Alladair woke me to steely light in the sick room. I knew at once that this would be a merciless day, knew it before I heard a word from Alladair. But he quickly told me, his great face twisted. ‘Mr Bettany, George’s struggle is over.’
I got up and went to the little truckle bed. Bernard stood above it, weeping. My wafer of child was sunk in it, deep as an ingot, determined already in death’s velocity to recede from us. ‘His earlier suffering was terrible,’ said Alladair, ‘but over the past two hours he has been very peaceful.’
‘For sweet Christ’s sake, why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I had crept in here and I mistook the tranquillity of the end for the beginning of a recovery, and thought it best to let you rest.’
I inspected George’s face. I could see beneath the infant features the ghost of the man who would never be.
‘Your wife however, your wife seems more settled.’
‘How would you know, sir?’ I yelled at the poor doctor. He, I thought, could bear a sympathetic face but go home to his wife and children. ‘Diphtheria is a disease of slums. It’s a disease of Manchester, for dear God’s sake. How could it come all this way, to the open bush, and take my son?’
‘The worst of ill fortune, my dear fellow. That’s how.’
I insisted on raising the feather-light body of my son and embracing him. I was demented, and this was, of all my life, the greatest agony. This, I thought, is what people mean when they call something insupportable. I could not support this grief. I felt my body melting beneath it. I looked to Bernard but in her eyes, blurred themselves by loss, there was nothing to aid me. I wanted my heart to stop, and my soul to find hell.
The doctor persuaded me to let go of George. My next impulse was to flee the house, to go raging amongst those boulders, to be impaled by those screaming winds, and to discover at last, beyond a ridge somewhere, this very moment, this very room again, but with the scene altered, my inheritor, my boy, having woken from profound sleep and saying in joyful recognition, ‘Papa’.
‘Steady, Bettany,’ said Alladair, taking firm hold of my arm. ‘Be brave. Think of your wife.’
That morning Dr Alladair permitted me to emerge from the house – I had clearly outlasted some phase of quarantine he had in his head. I saw my men move around the outbuildings, and heard Maggie Tume yelling from the men’s cookhouse. In this clear, sharp day, currawongs shouted from the tall eucalypts whose every branch stoo
d out in the clear air, whose every leaf was a dun spear point. I called for Clancy. We had got beyond improvised coffins. There was a man in Cooma who made polished and decorated ones. Clancy was to go to town with my son’s height – two feet five inches – written on a sheet of paper and bring back one, waiting should the man need to make one specially. While the coffin was being prepared, he was to let Mr Paltinglass know that we had lost our adored son, and place in the fledgling Cooma Courier a memorial notice I had written. I warned Clancy most grimly against stopping on the way or the return at the public house newly established just north of Mount Bulwa station.
For the moment, George lay in the same room as Phoebe, who had utterly lost the wit and the strength to ask about him. In the parlour Bernard fed Alladair and myself a meal of bacon and fried bread and tea. Taking back my plate barely quarter-eaten from me, she said, ‘Let us pray for Mrs Bettany, sir. A man as young and strong as you will have other children.’ Had anyone else – Alladair, for example – suggested that, I would have become engorged with rage. But since it came from Bernard I madly set myself almost to considering that halfway a prophecy, a divine chastisement, and a cause of minute hope.
I had Long get the phaeton ready – it was appropriate as overseer he should attend the funeral with me. When I had bought this vehicle it had been in expectation of Phoebe, myself and our children proceeding in it to town for special occasions, to cricket matches and picnic race meetings. Now it was my son’s tiny body which, coffined, was to travel roped to the ledge behind the main seat.
Before I left I went to say goodbye to Phoebe, finding her in a state of maternal clarity. Her eyes glazed with intelligence. ‘George is gone,’ she told me, and her face became sodden with grief. I caressed her, I kissed her forehead. I gathered her thin body off the pillows, embraced it, repented of my delusions. I said the usual things: the little fellow was with God, had died without suffering, but that she must not deprive me of son and wife, that she must recover, for her sake, mine, for the sake of unborn children amongst whom we would keep George’s name green.