The Drowner Read online

  In his speech the owner of the West Australian, John Winthrop Hackett, feigns surprise at the presence in the marquee of ‘some politicians and public men who used to discuss the water scheme with murder in their eyes’. Then Lord Forrest himself bellies up to the lectern to pay tribute to the dead Engineer-in-Chief, regretting that ‘the great builder of the work is not among us this day to receive the honour that is due to him’.

  Will can’t bring himself to look at O’Connor’s widow, proud and sorrowful at the main table. Instead he recalls the barrow-men abseiling down the slope, the cool smell of virgin stone, the workmen’s ironical whistles. He hears the novel throb of the pump engines and sees only the blue skin of the water in relation to the walls of the dam. The level seems low. High evaporation. In sudden fright he envisions the dam drying up before the opening of the pipeline itself. He sees the grand moment at the other end of the pipetrack culminating in a nightmarish trickle, a sterile puff of dust.

  What would she think?

  Over the hum of speeches and the mingling buzz of crickets in the gum trees drooping over the valley, he hears a sudden break in engine rhythm, a faltering heartbeat, and rushes from the marquee to investigate. Outside, the glare stuns him like a concussion. Sunflashes exploding from the brass of the Bavarian Band. Jackets unbuttoned, drenched vests and braces and hairy stomachs hanging over their pants, the bandsmen slouch by their tubas and flugelhorns drinking beer. Squinting into the glare, he hurries along the path of baking rocks. Bile floods into his mouth. His anxious saliva tastes of horseradish and claret. But at the pumping station the machinery, surprisingly, is turning smoothly and purposefully. Applause patters in the distant marquee. The only arhythmic sound in the whole droning day is the throbbing of his head.

  The completed water main rises beside him, and keeps unrolling and inclining east until it disappears in a heat mirage over the raw boulders. A continuous line drawn in the waterless haze of the interior. People existing at the other end of it.

  There it is.

  The sun hangs over the valley like a bridge.

  The buzzing of blowflies and the urgent sweetness of early decomposition sliding under the door from the funeral parlour: when he’s writing nothing else registers. Pressed by this conjunction of sound and smell, Felix Locke quickly finishes his poem in mid-morning one hot Wednesday in late January.

  He calls it simply ‘The Hands’. More than 850 words long. He’s neither pleased nor disappointed with it. He only knows he feels drained and hollow. But it’s finished. In a daze he drops it off at the Weekly Miner office before he can change his mind.

  But a moment after he submits it he’s hot-faced with embarrassment. In the street outside his pulse is racing. His extremities tingle. Ten yards from the newspaper office and he’s puffing already. His ears ring. What terminal illness is this? In the familiar bright street his vision is so blurred he hardly recognises acquaintances. Those he can make out among the flickering shapes make him feel as self-conscious as an adolescent. Smirking as if they’ve read the poem already.

  He consoles himself: the Miner probably wouldn’t publish it. At that length, they’d have to bring out a special edition! He’s an undertaker, not a poet.

  But why shouldn’t they publish it? The thought of rejection makes him indignant. It’s the best thing he’s written—and maybe even read.

  But if they did? It isn’t too late to withdraw it. At least erase a vital part of it.

  He swerves into the public bar of the Prince of Wales seven hours before his usual evening drink. Whatever had possessed him? He’d never live it down.

  The dedication under the title.

  For Inez.

  To the strains of a jovial Schottisch from the Bavarian Band, a special train steams out of Perth the next day, passing, then heading away from the afternoon sun, carrying the official guests to the goldfields. The real opening of the water scheme can only take place there. Seventeen hours of humid, jolting travel lie ahead.

  Will hadn’t realised how often the pipeline diverted course from the railway, crossing jauntily from one side of the line to the other, or disappearing under or around some natural obstacle. Now he restlessly roams the corridor, hardly daring to take his eyes off it in case it snakes off and escapes through the scrub. The politicians, generals and businessmen try to pass the time with card games, whisky and sleep (Nellie Melba plays canasta with the Forrests) while the Bavarian Band squeezes up and down the aisle playing waltzes and, after sunset, when the musicians have forced a party mood on the passengers, a little brassy Nachtmusik.

  They wake in the desert. In the early hours of Saturday the haggard visitors reach the western edge of the goldfields. The yawning bandsmen are first off the train. Flags and bunting flap in the dawn easterly over the railway station and across the wide welcoming streets of the thirsty township.

  By eight o’clock all the guests except Will are breakfasted and feted and arranged on seats to view a parade of the Bavarian Band, the district fire brigade and the local Afghan cameleers in their most brilliant silks and gold vests and turbans. Will is at the number eight pumping station anxiously supervising water-pressure adjustments as Lord and Lady Forrest step up into a cart decorated as a ship and are drawn along the street by twenty children dressed in sailor suits.

  After these ordeals Forrest declares this preliminary portion of the goldfields’ water scheme ‘open for the use of the people’. A ceremonial marble fountain has been erected. He turns a guiding wheel and opens a valve. Will holds his breath. The procession and celebrations have stirred up so much dust the pipeline is barely discernible against the red earth.

  A clear stream of water spurts into the thick air.

  To witness this is as good as any dream he aches to share with her.

  And then, following the official luncheon and more speeches, the visitors haul themselves on board once more. The carriages have been standing in the heat for eight hours. The temperature inside is 110 degrees. Thankfully, the final leg of their journey to the hub of the goldfields is only twenty-five miles. Nevertheless they all drop instantly into heavy sleep. Again they wake from their stupor to see the skyline transformed. In the hazy distance now are tall smokestacks, high poppet heads like forest-fire watchtowers, and snowy heaps of tailings luminous in the heat. Few of the visitors have seen such an unearthly sight. The moat of mirages and alabaster salt lakes surrounding the town gives a first impression of shimmering watery depth and impenetrable defences, but the train steams across the pipeclay surfaces and arrives at the town.

  On this afternoon, Ham suddenly feels bound to copy the child’s mannerisms. Pushing out his tongue. Flapping his arms from their flexed elbows. Pretending to be a marionette joyeuse. Screaming and splashing in their endless bath.

  Of course Ada shrieks at yet another wet and delightful game. Ham’s pleased and shrieking, too. Another role carried off to perfection: the three-year-old happy puppet.

  Angelica can’t believe the cruel mockery. ‘Stop that!’

  He plops out his tongue and flaps water at her.

  She’s nauseated by the performance. The smell of rotten eggs. His patchy face and stubbly eyebrows. His nakedness. She is desperate to bathe and dress.

  ‘No more.’

  Now he’s wearing the dripping wash-flannel on his head, wagging a scolding loofah. Pursing his lips into a cat’s arse. Covering his chest and groin like a shy virgin. Mocking her now.

  This is Ham being placatory.

  Soothing old King Neptune says he’s sorry.

  ‘I’m such a bad boy.’

  Reeds and duckweed hanging from his ears. A big scratchy kiss as she’s still gasping for breath. Tongue thrusting into her panting mouth.

  Just now the air has become a solid wall around her. She hears a creaking, as if something is rocking back and forth on the floorboards. The creaking comes up behind her, then stops and a peculiar sensation passes through her. Her muscles feel paralysed, her skin is clammy, and
her hair, just as in the bluntest melodramas—The Spectre Bridegroom!—seems to stand on end.

  Then she forces through the barrier of air and lifts Ada screaming from the bath. Slippery, boneless body arching backwards like a bridge.

  Ada is screaming for him, a marionette furieuse, limbs flapping angrily for her splashy Hammy.

  He’s roaring ferociously and rising rampant from the eggy water.

  And she’s bursting out of the room in tears calling for Edith. ‘Take her, for God’s sake, take her.’

  Passing squirming Ada to the nanny. Slamming doors. The sudden urgency of attending the ceremony! Dressing quickly. Making up her face. Endeavouring to compose herself. Prevailing over events. After all, I am an actress.

  And Ham is standing in the doorway in his silk robe, holding his script, his face arranged in the wise, stern lines of someone playing a famous actor just three hours before opening night. The late afternoon light is complimentary. Calming shadows lengthen across the room. He sniffs at her eau de Cologne and smiles wistfully.

  ‘I do hope you’re not running off before we go over our lines?’

  The desert is not completely horizontal. There is a hill outside town, rather grandly named Mount Charlotte. On top of it a reservoir has been built to hold and disperse the water from the coast. It’s basically a metal tank eighty feet in diameter, fifteen feet deep. Here the Chief’s pipeline comes to an end at a big silver, wheel-shaped tap. As 5 p.m., the time of the ceremony, approaches, the people of the goldfields climb the winding path up the steep slope. Despite the still scorching heat, and the mines and shops and offices still being open and working, more than twelve thousand people are trudging up the hill and crowding around the small circular reservoir to await the arrival of water.

  The national leaders gather on the dais by the reservoir as the restless crowd cheers and whistles. Some wags recognise famous faces from the newspapers. ‘George!’ they shout at a prominent Sydney politician. ‘Nellie!’ they cry to Melba. ‘You beauty! Sing us a song!’

  Will is confident that by this final stage the procedure is foolproof. The number eight pumping-station generators have proved in perfect order. Everything works. The water can’t but flow profusely at the proper moment. And thereafter. All the water has to do is fall, to reclaim the horizontal. Do its job as the transitory element, the essential metamorphosis between fire and earth.

  Then why can’t he compose himself like the glazed politicians and mining magnates and operatic soprano perspiring beside him? Like O’Connor’s serene, proud widow? Let Forrest’s biblical self-satisfaction wash over him.

  Again his eyes rake the eager brown-faced crowd.

  ‘I promised to bring you from the west coast a river of pure water,’ Lord Forrest entones, and pauses for applause, ‘and that river has delivered itself in the arid desert, 351½ miles from its source!’

  Where is she?

  Forrest, the gruff old explorer-turned-politician, is as emotional as anyone in the circle of upturned, cheering faces as he grabs the big tap-wheel, swings it around and turns on the water.

  And so is the engineer moved, touched by the gushing scene before him, the round after round of cheers under the low burning sun. A sob lodges in his throat and almost chokes him. Water is truly the most receptive of elements. Gratitude flows after it.

  Heads are swinging towards this woman. She is hurrying up the slope, her hair disarranged, all in sweet, hot disorder, smiling and waving.

  Men had torn off their clothes and died of thirst with this hill in their eyes. Now around its base the water celebrations were beginning. Of course the Bavarian Band had started up, and the children’s maypole dancing. Afghans and their elaborately caparisoned camels were noisily assembling. Giggling and wise-cracking members of the Dramatic Society, perhaps thrown out of gear by the threat of serious competition from the London theatre, flitted through the crowd dressed, inexplicably, as butterflies. On the ant-bed track Arthur Postle, alias the Crimson Flash, the footrunning wizard from the Darling Downs, was limbering up for his 75-yard race against the world champion, R.B. Day of Ireland.

  The sweating crowd scuttling down the slope from the reservoir was keen to move on to the next event, skittish with the excitement of the entertainments to come: the banquet to be held in the electric tramway barn (the only building big enough), the first night of the first real goldfields play.

  Ten minutes after the opening of the water scheme the people had gone.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said. She might have been a girl liaising in the Pump Room or on the banks of the Avon. She peered over the lip of the reservoir. ‘Are there fish in there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought tiny fish materialised in desert waters? That some miracle of nature put them there.’

  ‘Give them time.’ He was looking at her face, feeling half-mad, thinking: It’s the liquidity in our eyes that makes these fantasies occur.

  ‘Your reservoir needs something on its surface. Maybe a swan.’

  A swan. He remembered the reckless times they had made love outdoors. In the reeds and willow fronds and frost. He said, ‘That was him watching us that night on Batheaston common.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He thought of change, of the way events in the desert had gradually become a becoming. A change in levels had occurred, from potentiality to a higher level of reality. See, engineering could do it just as well as philosophy. Move against the tide, push water uphill. For a moment you could forget that water always flowed, always fell, always ended in horizontal death.

  She touched his face. ‘I’m thirsty, strangely enough,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘That might be difficult.’

  It was while searching for some cup or scoop, any container to hold liquid, to dip down into the tap’s now lessening flow, that they heard the steps sounding on the gravel and the joyous ululations of the child trill across the skin of water.

  Ham stood glistening and panting with Ada in his arms on the rim of the reservoir. Two minds slipped free of any other concern but the water and the reflected sunset shining below them.

  When he jumped it was surprisingly without drama or any remark that they could understand. They were moving cautiously around the rim towards him. He was half-smiling and still puffing from the climb. It was a ten-foot drop: Ada stayed in his arms when they hit the water, and even after their circle of ripples widened and spread and bounced against the smooth walls of the reservoir.

  In his mind he was saying, ‘The night that never sleeps awakens the waters of a pond that is always sleeping,’ but his shout sounded nothing like that. Both he and Ada were gurgling and splashing, as they loved to do, inhaling and coughing and threshing and—at last—sinking satisfactorily for once, reaping the full benefit of the pure crowding water.

  Will’s leaping after them was instinctual. The swimming, the diving down, the fighting over the choking child. Of course Ham wasn’t going to let her go. He made keening sounds like hers at Will’s efforts to release her. He was crying in frustration as he held her under and allowed the water in.

  It took all Will’s force just to raise her gaping face above the surface now and then, and stay afloat; all Ham’s essence to submerge her and himself. Only the ferocious attack from Angelica—the sudden fierce hands around his throat, the relentless pushing down—could break the stalemate in the shadowy pool. As Will prised the little girl away—that pale, strange, half-conscious angel—Angelica was growling astride Ham’s head and shoulders and still bearing down.

  Festooned, ballooned, in the wet and smothering folds of dress and petticoat, Ham allowed himself to sink—encouraged it—and disappeared.

  They were locked in silence, treading water in the dusk, floating and holding each other up. They had told each other they could be patient. They had long since shrugged off their heavy and confining clothes. Off and on, Ada snored across their linked and outstretched arms. In the distance fireworks crackled and showered into the cle
ar air. A sliver of moon and the red fading sun of a hot summer day both streaked the surface of the little reservoir.

  Coolness is a characteristic of water.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As this romance touches on various elemental fancies it was appropriate to present a stylised Wiltshire and environs, East Africa and Western Australia. And to take liberties with geography, dates and a few historical figures (notably, a childhood hero of mine, C.Y. O’Connor) who did inhabit the time and place I gave them in this fiction.

  I wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of: in England, George and Louie Baker, of West Lavington, Devizes, Wiltshire; Lavinia Greenlaw and the London Arts Board; and the Arts Council of England; in Zimbabwe and Zambia, Bill Williams; and in Australia, Charlie Baker, Susie Carleton, Jill Hickson, Dr Allan Meares and Professor Ron Trent.

  I appreciated some insightful discussions in London’s South Bank Centre with Matthew Sweeney and Thomas Lynch and would like to acknowledge information drawn from Mr Lynch’s article ‘The Undertaking’ in the London Review of Books (22 December 1994).

  Other informative sources were the excellent Gold and Typhoid: A Social History of Western Australia 1891–1900, by Vera Whittington; August Sander’s classic book of photographs, Anlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), whose foreword, Faces, Images and their Truth, by Alfred Döblin, I drew on; a quotation by Richard Avedon on studio photography in Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Hamlet and Richard III by William Shakespeare; In Old Kalgoorlie, by Robert Pascoe and Frances Thomson; The Chief, by Merab Tauman; Daughters of Midas, by Norma King (a singular version of whose title I borrowed for the play at the novel’s end); Water in England, by Dorothy Hartley; Village Notes, by Pamela Tennant; Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels, by Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson; and, not least, Water and Dreams, by Gaston Bachelard, especially the section from which I gleaned part of the funeral oration on pages 79–80. I also thank Murray Bail for the Guide to Rhodesia for the Use of Tourists and Settlers (Bulawayo, 1914).