Illywhacker

"I took the responsibility", said Charles, "to pay the bond."

"Ha ha," said Henry Underhill, looking at the camera. "Ha ha."

"That's right," said Jack Coe, hidden under his black hood. "Mr Badgery, please, a smile."

"You'll never make a business man, lad," said Henry Underhill, scratching himself in the secret of his pocket.

"I am a business man."

Emma murmured in her young husband's ear.

"I would have paid half," said Emma's father.

"Right, now, steady," said Jack Coe.

"I would have paid half!" yelled Henry Underhill. "You'll never make a business man. You'll never make a business man's bootlace."

It was the best photograph taken. Both Henry and Charles had spoiled the others but now they beamed at Jack Coe's camera and Underbill's face was so creased you could not notice the swellings. No one looking at the photographs since that day has ever doubted the quality of their happiness.

22

It is obvious to anyone – Emma Underhill was Henry Underbill's daughter. This was not, it seems, so obvious to Charles. When he paid his five hundred quid and took possession of the daughter, he imagined himself to have liquidated the father and erased his influence. So if the Marching Martinet had once fathered Emma Badgery, now he was forced to magically un-father her, to withdraw his penis and blow it like a nose in his checked handkerchief, to fold the handkerchief like a table napkin and slip it through a silver ring, to leave his seed where it would do no harm, on the kitchen table. Emma had emerged, de novo, untainted. Charles had paid his five hundred quid and Emma, therefore -I trust you follow – had never made her father's tea, blancoed his webbing, held out her hand for the sharp burn of his strap or her lips towards his frosty affections.

Once they were safely in Sydney Charles never mentioned his father-in-law again and the only message he ever sent him was each year at Christmas when he added his signature (C. Badgery) to the card his wife sent. And because his memory, like any river, changed its course, cut a corner here, exaggerated another there, soon all he could remember was that Henry Underhill had said Emma had a backside like a horse. It certainly did not occur to him that he had been warned about her mental stability.

If it had not been for the war (whose slow birth he had watched so keenly and also so wilfully ignored) I doubt that the question would have arisen. In almost every respect Charles and Emma were well suited to each other.

Leah, who came to visit their little shop, saw (typically) what was good about the place – that it had a murmuring, nurturing quality. It was a place of succour and tenderness. Leah was delighted with the variety of life, the rabbits, big and fat, the lorikeets as richly coloured as oriental rugs, the dull white-eyed python waiting patiently to lose its skin, the not-for-sale Gould's Monitor, the little seas of kissing jewels which were aquariums, the smell of straw, apples, grain, and the volatile odours of faeces which were, mixed together, pleasant and repugnant all at once.

Amongst these charges the newlyweds were like a pair of giant children, forever kneeling or bending, pacifying, supplicating their easily upset charges. They both had big hands and big feet and young faces and Emma's speech, although shy and indistinct, did not feel timid but rather sensuous and sleepy. She seemed to speak with the drowsiness of a happy lover.

It is true that Charles talked a great deal but he did not do it to exclude his wife and looked, continually, to her for agreement, so that the whole business enterprise was flavoured with their great tenderness together. And although Leah was interested in the problems facing the best pet shop in the world, what really pleased her was the couple's affection.

She was impressed too that they wished to do everything properly from the beginning, had made appointments to speak to people at the zoo, made notes and constructed cages that were really too big for the little shop. It was a mistake, perhaps. But they were happy not to have a prison like those overcrowded holes in Campbell Street. The big cages did create problems because they had to bunk one species in with another. The pretty blue bonnets had showed themselves to be pugnacious in the extreme. Feathers had flown. Blood had run.

And Emma had been wonderful, Charles said. The girl blushed and lowered her eyes. Leah could imagine those strong-wristed hands offering succour to wounded rosellas or rescuing a terrified guinea-pig from the well-meaning attentions of a buck rabbit.