‘Your flute,’ Nell said.
He frowned, as if she were a child who’d been cheeky, and told an approaching waiter to fetch him a chair. He’d bathed and shaved and smelled like the West.
Again we wandered. We walked through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We looked at the watercolors by Julian Ashton and a new exhibit of Aboriginal bark paintings. We sat at a café with tables outdoors, like in the New Yorker drawing. We ordered things we hadn’t seen in years: veal, Welsh rarebit, spaghetti. But none of us ate more than a few bites of any of it.
On the way back to the Black Opal I saw that Nell’s limp was worse.
‘It’s not my ankle,’ she said. ‘It’s these shoes I haven’t worn for two years.’
When we passed a chemist’s I stayed back and slipped inside. The girl behind the counter looked part Aboriginal, rare for a shopkeeper in Sydney then. She passed me the box without speaking.
‘I think I can pay for my wife’s plasters,’ Fen said, pushing me aside to give her the money.
At the hotel the clerk handed us a note from Claire Iynes, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney, inviting us to dinner.
‘How’d she know we were here?’ Nell said.
‘I rang her up yesterday,’ Fen said.
He wanted to tell her about the flute.
‘Dinner? How are we to go to a dinner, Fen?’
‘There’s a dress shop two doors down, miss,’ the clerk said. ‘Hair and beauty across the street. Fix you up smart.’
A cab took us up to Double Bay, where Claire and her husband lived, just above Redleaf Pool.
‘Poshy posh,’ Fen said out the window to the large houses on the water. He brought his head back in. ‘Claire has moved up in the world. What did she marry into?’
‘Mining, I think. Silver or copper,’ Nell said, the first sentences she’d uttered since we’d gotten the invitation.
Fen smirked at me. ‘Bankson doesn’t like it when the colonists talk about where money comes from.’
It wasn’t a large dinner, nine of us around a small table in what seemed to be a drawing room. The vast dining room was on the other side of the house, too big, we were told, for four couples and the English hanger-on. No one knew quite what to make of my presence. I wasn’t headed home; I wasn’t finished with my fieldwork. We hadn’t thought this through. It highlighted even for us the fact that I’d followed them all the way here with no good reason. I think I had been waiting all along for Fen to say ‘Why are you here, Bankson? Why don’t you leave us the hell alone?’ Because my only reason, the reason he knew as well as I, was that I was in love with his wife. He could have called me out anytime, and he could have done it right there with witnesses in the Iyneses’ house, but instead he said, ‘He’s been ill. Seizures. We thought he should see a doctor.’
There was a long discussion about doctors in Sydney and who would be the best for mysterious tropical diseases. Eventually Fen rerouted them with talk of our ‘breakthrough,’ he called it, our grid, and we spent most of the evening mapping out the guests and mutual acquaintances, of which there were many. One man with a great heavy moustache knew Bett from a project he’d done in Rabaul; another had read zoology with my father at Cambridge. Claire seemed to know every anthropologist we could name, and caught us up on the department gossip in three different countries.
Fen flourished in fresh company, bringing out all the Mumbanyo stories with which he once entertained me. I watched him twirl his wineglass, eat prawns with a sterling silver oyster fork, accept a light from an engraved lighter—this man I’d seen shit off the side of a bark canoe, covered in another man’s blood. I saw then that any remorse he’d shown us had been an act. He was exuberant, a man who was just about to seize hold of the best stretch of his life. He fed off of Nell’s and my disorientation.