A Boat Load of Home Folk Read online

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  Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925 and studied at the University of Queensland. She taught in schools in Queensland and New South Wales, then at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1968 and 1980.

  The author of fourteen novels, two novellas and two short-story collections, she won the Miles Franklin Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) and Drylands (2000), which was also nominated for the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow was nominated for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award, and in 1989 she was awarded the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature. In 1992 she became an Officer in the Order of Australia, and received a special award at the 2002 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for lifetime achievement. She died in 2004.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  THEA

  ASTLEY

  A Boat Load of

  Home Folk

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Angus & Robertson in 1968

  Copyright © Thea Astley 1968

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 562 0 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 309 6 (ebook)

  contents

  I 7 a.m., 10th December

  II September

  III 8 a.m., 10th December

  IV 8 a.m., 10th December

  V November

  VI 8.15 a.m., 10th December

  VII 1 p.m., 10th December

  VIII 4 p.m., 10th December

  IX 7 p.m., 10th December

  X 3.30 p.m., 10th December

  XI 3 a.m., 11th December

  XII 3 a.m., 11th December

  XIII 7 a.m., 11th December

  XIV 9 a.m., 12th December

  I

  7 a.m., 10th December

  THIS is a postcard from latitude sixteen degrees south and longitude one hundred and fifty-eight degrees east. It is a glossy colour print that has the fault of being only two-dimensional, but if you look hard enough and long enough your trapped eyes will begin to notice that the boat in the middle distance, the Malekula, is swinging slightly, anchored in dense blue.

  Time? Seven twenty. The heat is only just beginning.

  It’s too far away to see the shore in any detail but now and again there is a moment of bleached houses, the green smoke of trees and a sprawl of native stores, pub, mission buildings, hospital and prison.

  There are far too many palms.

  Someone below deck says “Port Lena” and there is another colour card of the lot of them at breakfast—papaw, pineapple, canned tomato juice and stale bread rolls.

  There are two maiden ladies in the sad years, a married couple (the dialogue is grudging), an island agent coming back from tour, a bulky priest who is mainly silent, and the captain who has been bickering with the agent for five seasons. The agent is Irish expatriate, cultivated, testy; the captain is bulging, of Dutch extraction and the other man’s natural enemy. There are three native boys who are kept well out of sight. They have all been together since the last landfall two nights ago and some hope to be together for another night or two until they reach the mainland port. Cards and liquor have opened many private places and everyone is in debt to Father Greely who out of the goodness of his heart has granted them all a plenary indulgence.

  The two sea-nights had been hot and slow.

  After dinner they would go up on the deck for an hour or so and then, when the women had crept into the bunks recessed in pairs, the men had played poker and drunk whisky until two and three. Bedded, they would all lie awake in the heavy oily air, aware of sounds behind sound, of the clicking of loosened teeth, the furtive movement of a hand when Gerald in a selfish desire to soothe at least himself reached out for his wife in the dark. The priest would lie with his eyes slitting the greyness of the cabin and remember the well-stuffed beds of the cathedral house, more comfortable than the usual sin of the flesh, and try not to hear as the husband and wife argued in undertones. On deck the boys snored.

  Now it was over for a few days. They were trying to conceal their lust for land and for absence from each other, and the harbour around them threatened with its certain momentum. Captain Brinkman was wolfing his third roll and over his munching moustache was watching the passengers with his benign but greedy eyes. He liked to know all the things others would most wish to conceal. He chewed noisily because he knew it irritated Stevenson who was talking across the wild painted ladies to Mrs Seabrook. In this air the mirrors of confronting faces were slightly clouded or perhaps the glaze was peeling off.

  “Seven years,” Stevenson was saying in answer to her question. She had a way of parting her lips as she waited for the reply that made him want to pop it in with his tongue and he found this thought appalling. He hesitated, then added, “It’s a kind of home now, I suppose, because of associations mainly. I’ve got a lot, well, not a lot, but quite a few dear friends here.” He ignored the captain’s hairy smirk and, scanning Mrs Seabrook with his whisky-and-water eyes, felt enormously sad for that time of morning. Through the galley ports the sky had the transparency of the youngest souls.

  Elderly Miss Paradise, in tropic white and an orange headband of sorts into which she had tucked some of the monstrous perm that always threatened to explode, gave her frayed naughty glance between sips of warm tomato. But Captain Brinkman was unmoved, patted his stomach and made the sign of the cross.

  “Excuse me,” he said. The half-bow was ironically challenging. They all ignored it. “Excuse me.”

  He withdrew just too late to intercept the wonderful smile Mrs Seabrook suddenly gave Stevenson who, taking it full in the eyes, felt guilty for the minute (her husband, his mistress) but decided she was still a pretty woman. There was an occasional untidy curl, a lilt to the mouth and of course the insanity of personal quirks—the easel, the exotic canvases that she trailed everywhere on the narrow deck, plunging between ropes and hatch covers with her head scarf tumbling off. She spoke little, too, but it was often amusing.

  In the galley the plaque of Saint Joseph was standing indifferent to the heaped-up plates one of the boys was flicking with a dish-mop. No miracle was going t
o polish them off. Brinkman’s voice off-stage roared at him and the breakfasters who were facing the galley saw the hands shocked into a mess of frantic soap bubbles. Mr Seabrook sulked over his coffee wondering why he had come on this pseudo-placatory gesture to patch a marital breach and wishing he were back in the safe round he had created for himself of office, club, golf, occasional infidelity (why did she never retaliate? why did she always forgive?) and medical checkup every twelve months. He was only fifty but he felt a lot more even when he was acting considerably younger, which was most of the time. “Please don’t make a fool of yourself this year?” Kathleen had begged before the last Christmas party, but he had barged straight ahead, infuriated by her timid protest, and had drunk himself silly before midnight and had been punched by another husband before one thirty. Now he regarded her round, still-bright face with its incredible facility for recovery and felt only boredom. At forty, he told her mentally and savagely, you have no business looking still the wondering child bride bravely gulping back its tears whenever it gets hit. He could have smacked her there and then, but Miss Paradise, busy with crumbs and thoughtless as a fanatic, brushed and flicked, popped chunkier remnants between her puce lips and rose unexpectedly to angular heights. They would all gaze up at her, just for those few seconds, she imagined, and she would in her turn twinkle down at them, not quite flirtatious, but knowing, genteel, and adventurous.

  “I must go up on deck,” she said. “It’s too exciting.” And flapped at the men to remain seated. Gerald Seabrook who only rose for lovely or important women murmured something more crumbled than toast to his wife, who smiled unwillingly and sipped her black coffee. Miss Paradise, meanwhile, inclined her maypole body, for she never grew tired of the surface play, but had some difficulty negotiating the companionway with her friend, Miss Kitty Trumper, breathing uneasily behind. Both their bags hitched onto the same handle and there was a terrible moment when it seemed they would never be separated, but at last they were up and outside, their breaths caught by the suddenness of the harbour and the dominating cone of Tongoa wispily smoking above the clean line of the beach. Even from here flamboyants hallooed redly between the houses and the waterfront stores and behind that, behind the white jumble of official buildings and shipping company sheds, on the last hillside terrace great prongs of tree growth like giant seeded lettuce pointed up between the buri-trees.

  Had they been closer they would have noticed there were no birds.

  No movement showed on the shore or on the small island astern where more official buildings protested patchily between trees, trailing their bureaucratic suffixes along the sullen morning skyline. Yet Miss Paradise’s eyes were drawn back to the crater until she found herself repeating its name with a kind of hieratic rhythm to placate something only half-threatening in its blackened lip. Miss Trumper put tentative fingers upon her arm, but she ignored this touch and gave herself up to the enticement of the new scene. She adored arrivals, the expectancy of adolescence never failing her, and each unexplored landscape, each unknown group of houses or stores, each medley of still unsorted faces, insisted on the possibility of exotic chance and, though she had long ago desisted from active optimism, a Mister Right. . . . She didn’t really care if it were a Mister Wrong, though at sixty-two she knew, and her friends told her so, she should have had more sense.

  With her enormous circular sunglasses, she looked like some fabled aphid, striped hugely with scarf and brilliantly white in the morning. She could see no movement anywhere in the port and this, too, was strange, for some glint or glitter should have shown itself. From the bridge came the tick-tick of the radio and a giant hump of moving back as Brinkman worried the controls and gadgetry Miss Paradise never troubled to understand but could use as source of male-adulating ahs. Cars, engines, even cameras, were articles of faith for her that she accepted round-eyed and gazed at phoney-innocent, a pulsating mass of wonder when salesmen spieled or male friends adjusted. It had not worked with Captain Brinkman who chose that moment to stare at her rudely, she felt, through the protective glass he kept between himself and the passengers. In defence she linked arms with her friend who was tottering a little in her way-out north-of-Capricorn footwear and feeling the effects of the heat already. Together they tumtittitummed a nil desper-andum back along the deck.

  Their holiday joy was not actively erupting.

  “Now breakfast is over—” Miss Trumper had said cryptically.

  “Now breakfast is over what?”

  “We’re going ashore.”

  “It’s terribly hot. What are the Seabrooks going to do?”

  “Fight, I suppose.” Miss Trumper giggled, then put a frail elderly hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t really. . . .”

  “It will be hotter ashore,” said Miss Paradise who had every intention of going but loved to temporize.

  Miss Trumper had extracted a tiny set of binoculars from a plaited bag and before scanning rubbed a lens madly with a fresh white handkerchief.

  “You missed the left one,” Miss Paradise said acidly.

  “Did I?” Miss Trumper rubbed innocently and vigorously.

  “Look!” she cried, all of a sudden. “Darling black baby!”

  Miss Paradise ignored, trickling with sweat and complaining softly in a wordless blur. The island floated above its double and Miss Trumper dabbed again vigorously at the glass of her binoculars and put them once more to her eyes as if they might produce some succulent peep-show. There were other smaller islands in the bay behind the large one near which the Malekula had dropped anchor and on one of them near a discarded hulk she could just make out thatch and bamboo latticed into house. For her it was traveller’s joy. Every significant ploy of the gaudy tourist folders she was determined to discover and de-juice for rapture. She was geared to receive the devices of another people’s domestic exigencies with all the wonder of a Marco Polo.

  Between her gasps the Seabrooks had emerged into the sun. Stevenson had come up last and was talking to Francis Nguna, the deck-boy, who was rubbing his shy capable hands on the dirty white fragmentary shorts he wore and turning to fuss about the ship’s dinghy.

  “We’re not going now, are we?” Gerald Seabrook asked. “I’ve still got to load my camera.” He did not ask his wife this, but the two elderly ladies who were still quailing before the sun.

  “We don’t mind,” Miss Trumper said, edging a little sideways. Some preserving force always made her avoid the directness of his very blue gaze which was accustomed to practise pleasantries with children and personable females. He was twinkling winningly at her now. By some mistake, he felt himself.

  “We should set off,” he said, “before the heat. If you don’t mind waiting a minute while I go below.” I hate you, thought his wife. I am tired tired of the endless charm, the plausibility, the way you work on others. He was still talking, this time to Miss Paradise, and she could catch the words “serious moisture replacement”.

  “He means beer,” Kathleen Seabrook said quite harshly and moved away to the thin unhappy Stevenson hanging over the lowered dinghy. Without thinking, she put her hand on his arm to elicit a desperate sympathy. He was not aware, then, but went on talking to the boy who was all brown grin in the rocking boat. An outrigger canoe had come upon the Malekula silently, a Mother-Hubbard-clad islander paddling its load of swollen strawberry mangoes and bananas. Everything Gauguinesque, Kathleen decided, and took her unnoticed hand back. The appeal had not been passionate enough to distract either the agent or her husband who had gone for his camera. When Gerald’s bald head appeared above deck she observed the absurdity of her situation and began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?” Gerald asked, who was always afraid it might be himself.

  “Nothing,” she lied as was her habit these days. “It’s so still, isn’t it?” She sounded querulous.

  “Except for that canoe.”

  “Yes. Of course. Except for that.”

  Gerald always managed to prove he
r just that little bit wrong and she patted his arm to show he had scored again, that she knew it and did not mind.

  The five of them leant on the rail. Miss Trumper fidgeted with her carry-all and tucked hankies into crevices that were never filled in the abstract sense. Stevenson had straightened his skinny body with the pain he carried like a medal for the moment in abeyance, and felt, looking across at Miss Trumper, an almost-love that, now he was older, came with a gush for the unlovely or the unendurable even. He could have been tempted to love Mr Seabrook too, but the wife cried out tacitly for chivalric service that muddled his impulse. In her turn Miss Trumper, perceptiveness having drained away all inessentials, had a moment of urgent need to say “poor man” though she could not have said why.

  Now, with his twin angels of pain and despair, he smiled and said, “Off in ten minutes, if anyone’s interested.”

  They made sustained choruses of thanks. He did not listen, having endured for three cabined days the antagonisms and small hatreds.

  “What about the priest?” someone asked.

  They all agreed they had been thoughtless and who would go to look. It was Stevenson who went down finally and found the other bent over his small suitcase, packing neat squares of underwear while all the time the sweat rolled freely under his stiff collar and stained the black stock and stank mildly and in a way benignly through his fat armpits. He was a menacing man with heavy jowls, a black voice and the lard-like complexion of someone much older. He was surprisingly gentle, although his ruthlessness had not yet had reason to show its thick blunt edge. He was not a deeply religious man despite the outward conformities his job demanded, for job it was; and he was now a rather tired businessman in his master’s service, with the capabilities and many of the attitudes of a public service inspector. He had so little sense of humour and such a plenitude of stuffy attitudes he might have been Protestant. “It’s not that I’m intolerant,” he would try to explain to others. “I’m just so bored with all the corruption. I mean it doesn’t even stimulate me any more, either to emulate or even disapprove. I’m not stuffy. I’m stuffed up to the neck. That’s all!” And that was about as close as he got to a joke.