CLEARLY I DID NOT LACK curiosity about my fellowmen, but my intuitions and sympathies were limited by the circumstances of my birth. A person like my servant was a foreign land, so although I might very sincerely wish to imagine him, how might I begin?

This question became more pressing when, after a dinner of fatty goose, Master Larrit carried a bottle of brandy to my room and made it clear that he and I should shoot the breeze.

"If only there were a chair for you."

He shoved the papers to one side and sat himself on the edge of my bed. Then, holding up a forefinger in the manner of a low clown at a village fete, he produced a heavy tumbler from one pocket, holding it high between us while he poured a considerable amount. Continuing in the same broad style, he produced a second glass, and then generously rewarded himself with what was clearly cognac.

The first act done, he tossed the bottle on the bed.

We drank.

We smiled.

I thanked him.

But what next?

It was evident we must converse-he was set on it, he demanded it-but he clearly had no notion of how this game was played in society. So we were left toasting each other, with no commentary except that provided by the rude engine as it moaned and groaned and sent its endless revolutions industrielles to agitate our feet.

Still rather in the manner of an entertainer, he folded his ankle and rested it on his knee and one was left wondering what canary he would next produce.

"So," he said at last, "it is courting you go?"

As so often, I did not understand him immediately, but then I was all the more shocked by the personal nature of his inquiry. I had revealed far too much to him already, and thus I now rushed from his impertinent particular to the safety of the general. I asked him what his impressions were of American women.

He smiled and said he was a married man.

"They walk alone a good deal," I encouraged.

"Oh yes," he said, "you will come upon them everywhere, or with their young fellows. Courting," he said, grinning broadly so that I was almost certain he was imagining me with Miss Godefroy at Peek's farm.

"They enjoy a great deal of freedom," I said. "As married women they abandon it."

"Ah, do they now?" said he. "I would not know."

"On the contrary," I said. "You are a married man, as you just observed. And you were married once before, you said. You had a child." If this was cruel, it was no more than the cruelty of the bit we place in a stallion's mouth. It did its work.

"Aye," he said, and rubbed at his turbulent hair.

In fact I did not wish to punish him but rather to ask, Who are you? With my own kind I would never have made so artless an entree, but to him I said, "There is a great deal to you, John Larrit."

He considered me. "It is a wonder how many lives a man can hold within his skin," he said at last. "I never expected to be quit of any of them. I never expected there would be a change, do you understand me? I have been a cork in the ocean, sir." He smiled again, and I thought what a hell it must be to have no expectation of yourself, nothing but this endless, rootless freedom in which the bonds of family and responsibility could be so easily brushed aside.

"It was your father who was transported. The forger."

"You do not listen," he said fiercely. "My father was a good man. He was funny and kind and full of birds as we used to say. He was my home. I thought the paths I walked with him would be my life. The birds and trees and weather of a particular place. I have never deliberately quit on anyone."

"And where was that particular place?"

"In England." He would reveal no more to me than that. "I was transported by misadventure," he said. "You should understand. Your voyage to America was pretty much the same I think. In my case they made a convict child of me, and I seemed doomed never to leave my exile. As it turned out, it would be in exile I would find my consolation."

I assumed he meant his wife and child, but no.

"I could make art, you see. After a fashion."

"You made illustrations," I said, remembering the book in Duponceau's library. He looked at me sharply. "I admit they were rough," he said, at last. "I was looked up to, but only for the lack of men who could do it any better. My master could not draw a chicken. My only decent teacher was a book of engravings owned by Mrs. Paterson, but it was not fine. I could have done better. I knew I could do better."

"Do you think there may be, in any case, a problem with art in a democracy?"

"Democracy? Jesus. Excuse me, sir. You cannot call a jail a democracy. It was a dictatorship, a cruel one too. They did not transport a man for showing at the Royal Academy."

His glass was empty, but he filled mine first. The lantern had begun to sway.

"Very well," I said, speaking as to an equal, "but did you not observe the paintings on the walls of Philadelphia? They made me think that the taste for ideal beauty-and the pleasure of seeing it depicted-can never be as intense or widespread among a democratic as compared to an aristocratic people."

"So you look at art, then?" he asked, and for a nasty moment I thought he was sneering at me. "You own a canvas or two yourself, I suppose?"

"I was privileged to be born in a house of art."

"Great painters, sir. Hanging everywhere you looked."

"Indeed," I said, and wondered if this weight of wealth and culture pained him.

"Turner's father was a barber," he said suddenly. "A plain old barber with a wart on his nose."

"Turner?"

"An English painter."

"Where did that thought come from?" I asked, amused by the wart as much as anything.

He tapped his forehead with his glass.

"You are correct, it is a privilege. I had a house in Woollahra," he offered, rolling his tongue around the savage name. "At nighttime people came to be painted. As a result of Mrs. Paterson's book I had too much attachment to chiaroscuro effects, but I was popular enough."

I was embarrassed by the enormity of his misunderstanding. He stared at me, then drained the glass and held it beneath the swaying lantern, studying a tear of alcohol as it rolled along below the rim.

"With brandy," he said, "there is always one last drop."

Warily, I raised my glass.

"And you," he said to me directly. "Who are you?"

I thought, Here it is.

"You sir, had one life, all of a piece, not a bobbing cork. Just the same, it aches in certain weathers, as if you were born with a shattered bone and had it healed."

I did not know what he meant. I thought, How does he know this?

"Anyway," he said, "the damned Marquis de Tilbot came to fetch me."

"In Paris."

"In Sydney. He had not seen me since I was a boy. That's right, a boy. He walks into the government architect's office and says, 'Ah, there you are,' as if he had seen me yesterday. 'I promised I would return,' said he, and I was pleased! Can you imagine. I was pleased. He was a big posh Frenchman with his sunburned skull now growing through his hair. He flattered my work. He needed me, he reckoned. I must come with him to botanize for the Empress Josephine-or she who had been empress. Can you imagine saying that to me? Just that word, sir. Empress."

"What year was this then?"

"I was a fool. I thought I was being elevated. But I always believed I would return. I promised her."

I would have cross-examined him, but he sighed and reached across the bed where I had placed my papers. He then took up a single sheet which he laid on my tray and, taking a crayon, began to draw, frowning and showing his teeth. He occasionally wet his thumb in brandy and smudged at what he drew. He looked up, cocked a brow, returned to it. I wondered if I was being honored with a portrait. I thought, He will not flatter me.