The bus engine vomited diesel fumes as it climbed yet another steep hill. The rain had stopped, although the clouds still hung so low that they seemed almost to brush the bus’s roof as it finally made it to the top of the hill.
‘Nearly there,’ Jory said. ‘Boulders is down in the valley.’
Boulders … Marina thought the name had an ominous ring but immediately gave herself a mental slap on the wrist for thinking such nonsense. As Jory had said, it was only a name. There could be nothing threatening about a name, although she remained convinced that whoever had first settled the district must have had a reason for choosing such a strange one.
The bus began the descent. Nothing to see and the rain had started again, harder than ever, while a gusting wind whistled, bringing complaints from the bus’s old springs as it fought the succession of horseshoe bends.
‘Rain capital of the state,’ Jory said. ‘That’s Boulders.’
As though it were a matter of pride.
Halfway down the hill the colours began. Red, yellow, green. There was nothing pretty about them. On the contrary, they were unhealthy-looking in their essence, as though the rocks they stained were the victims of a plague.
‘What on earth?’ Marina said.
‘The smelting,’ Jory said. ‘The chemicals the miners used when they processed the minerals stained the rocks.’
‘I think it looks horrible,’ Marina said.
‘They didn’t care about looks. It meant money, and that was what mattered.’
‘Money for the owners.’
‘Sure. But jobs, too. Work wasn’t that easy to come by in those days. Not that easy now, come to that. Dad said before I left he’d fix me up with a job driving a truck between here and Hobart, but if that hasn’t come off it’ll be back to sea for me on one of the fishing trawlers working out of Strahan.’
‘But won’t that mean you’ll be away?’
‘Of course. Week at a time, sometimes longer.’
‘Leaving me alone?’
‘You’ll have Mum and Dad for company.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Adapting to this new world would be hard enough, even with Jory beside her; if he was away it would be ten times worse.
‘I’m not keen, myself. But I don’t want to starve, either,’ Jory said.
‘How do we go on from Boulders?’
‘We got a couple of horses at Noamunga. I brought one in with me, stabled her in the town. We’ll go home on Nelly.’
‘Two of us, one horse. How’s that going to work?’
‘Do what other women do. Tuck your skirt into your knickers and get up behind me.’ He saw her expression and laughed. ‘If you’re too ladylike for that, you can walk. If you’d rather.’
Committed to him or not, Marina wasn’t game to let him get away with remarks like that. ‘I got a better idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll ride and you walk.’
‘Got to be dreaming,’ he said.
Boulders at last. The bus panted to a halt in front of the war memorial. Marina climbed down, feeling a little as she imagined a criminal might on the way to the gallows.
She looked around at the hills scoured of vegetation, their rocky slopes daubed with the chemicals-induced stains—poisonous red, bilious yellow, vomit green—that were the residue of the smoke and spills of the smelting that had taken place in the district years before.
Boulders … No need to wonder any longer how the town had got its name; it was hemmed in on three sides by slopes where black boulders the size of houses lay half-buried in the ground.
‘What happens if one of them comes loose?’ she wondered.
‘You keep out of its way,’ said Jory, quite the joker now he was back on his home turf.
Two days’ travel away from Mole Creek, with its running streams and forested slopes, the places and people among whom she had been born and raised. Now Marina thought how all her past life might have been a million miles from this place with its hard and ruined soil, its lashing and pitiless rain beneath a thick blanket of cloud, its people hardened by endurance.
‘Welcome to the west coast,’ Jory said, standing beside her.
He led the way down the main street and into a side alley that took them to the stables where he’d left his horse. A slap on the back, a few minutes to chat with the stables’ owner, a few more with the horse—a placid, medium-sized grey mare—and they were heading out of town and up the dirt road that took them steadily uphill to the crest of what he had told her was called the Wombat Ridge. A steep climb. At the top Jory reined in to give Nelly a chance to catch her breath and for Marina, perched behind him like a barnacle on a rock, to take in the country ahead of them. The land and the vastness of the ocean extending to a grey horizon, closed by mist.
Below them the coastline, blurred by drifting clouds of spray, stretched away to the south. The sky was grey; the land, essentially featureless, was grey; the endless line of breakers, foam-capped, was grey, but the basalt cliffs standing tall and unmoving in the path of the seas were black. Except at one point, the line of cliffs continued unbroken as far as she could see to both north and south, but immediately below where they were now standing was a breach in the basalt wall where a narrow valley ran back from the coast to a plateau of more or less level ground at the base of the Wombat Ridge which, beneath the heavy cloud cover, was also black. All in all, a forbidding landscape, where the bones of the earth emerged stark and hard from the thin soil. In all that country Marina could see no sign of any human dwelling.
Yet she was untroubled, discovering in herself something whose existence she had never previously suspected: an eagerness to accept the challenge of this barren place. Henceforth this would be her home, for better or worse, and she was filled with excitement at the way her life had moved on from the country of trees to this landscape of rock and roaring seas.
‘How high up are we here?’
‘About five hundred feet. The Wombat Ridge is six hundred and fifty-three feet at its highest point further south.’
‘And the cliffs?’
‘Two hundred feet, maybe more.’
‘And where is our place?’
‘Near that break in the cliff. You can’t see it from here but you’ll see it when we get further down.’
A scud of rain came and almost immediately passed, but the dark clouds threatened there could be more on the way.
‘Better keep moving if we don’t want to get soaked,’ Jory said.
Down the hill they went, with Nelly, the sniff of home in her nostrils, making a good pace. Twenty minutes later they arrived at what Marina knew would be not only her new home but her new life.
Noamunga, known to the world as the Trevelyan place, consisted of two hundred acres of indifferent grazing lying between the sea and the Wombat Ridge rising like a high wall behind it.
The ridge was ten miles long and ran parallel with the coast, with Noamunga somewhere around the halfway mark. The ridge lay due east of the farm, which for those living there meant that even in summer it was almost midday before the sun broke free of the land. In winter it never made it at all; from May to August the only way the occupants could get to see the sun was by making the sharp climb to the summit of the ridge. In the pouring rain and heavy winds that were standard winter fare along that stretch of coast this was seldom an attractive proposition but, if you wanted to go into town, you had to put up with it because that was the only road.
The house, with its assortment of sheds, proved to be a wooden structure pickled black by generations of salt, with its feet in the water when king tides threw spray from the sudsy seas all over the blue-painted door. Yet it was sturdy, steel bolts that Jory had told her were six inches across and four feet long anchoring it firmly to the stone on which it was built. It had been constructed by Jory’s great-grandfather from a deck cargo of heavy beams come ashore after a killer storm. Family legend said he’d hammered and cursed them, sawn and pegged them, planed and chiselled the
m and ended with a house able to outlast the longest and most violent gales, as it had many times proved, as stalwart as the stone footing to which it was moored. Hawsers ran from the eaves to more bolts set in the rock, driven deep by hammer drills and the strength of the old man’s determination and arms.
‘Welcome to your new home,’ Jory said.
1993
CHAPTER 16
Charlotte had barely put down the phone after speaking to Marina when Tamsyn phoned.
Preoccupied with the animal effect Tommy Mendoza had had on her—God, she was still feeling antsy!—and the possibility of a Trident Oil strike with everything that might mean, she didn’t really want to talk. She and her sister had never really got along; Tamsyn’s Indian capers—when she was still a teenager, for God’s sake!—had left Charlotte wondering whether she’d ever known Tamsyn at all. But there she was now, on the phone, and, with no way to put her off without giving offence, she had no choice.
‘What a nice surprise!’
A lie Charlotte assumed Tamsyn had chosen to ignore when her sister said, ‘I had Greg on the phone earlier.’
‘What did he want?’
‘He tried to get hold of me last night but the line was hopeless so he phoned again this morning. He says he’s in trouble.’
Nothing new there; Greg was always in trouble.
‘What’s it this time? Fallen for another luscious Thai lady?’ Charlotte wondered.
‘First thing I said to him. More woman trouble? My very words. But he said it was more serious than that. He said he had to have money. That’s what he said: he had to have it.’
‘I like his nerve,’ Charlotte said. ‘He thinks we’re the bank, does he?’
‘He told me he’ll be in serious trouble if he doesn’t come up with something soon. Claimed he was desperate.’
‘We’ve heard that one before,’ Charlotte said. ‘He’s always desperate.’
‘The point is,’ Tamsyn said, ‘he’s claiming you told him that Mum would soon be rolling in loot and you were sure she’d be willing to bail him out. Did you tell him that?’
‘Of course not.’ She was certainly not going to admit to anything like that. ‘How much does he want, anyway?’
‘A lot.’
‘A thousand? Five? I suppose we might be able to raise five between us.’
‘How about quarter of a million?’ Tamsyn said.
‘Quarter of a mil—’ The shock left Charlotte not only speechless but barely able to think at all. She was only just able to take in Tamsyn’s next remarks.
‘I mentioned Greg to her when I phoned her earlier but I don’t think he’s tried to put the bite on her. Not yet.’
‘I can’t imagine what he’s thinking about,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s obvious none of us has that kind of money.’
‘But he seems to think you told him something like that,’ Tamsyn said. ‘So I think it’s up to you to give him the sad news, don’t you?’
From Charlotte’s point of view, it was a tricky situation. No way could she say they might soon be able to lay their hands on a lot more than a quarter-million. Mendoza obviously thought Trident might strike oil but that was a million miles from saying they had. There was no certainty Mother would be willing to sell, in any case—there were times when Charlotte quite despaired of her mother—but how to tell Greg she didn’t know. She might have implied Mother could be coming into money but there had never been any question of a guarantee. It was hardly her fault he’d chosen to take her so literally.
Telling him that might precipitate the sort of row she so detested, so in the end she decided her best course was to do nothing and not contact him at all.
A quarter of a million dollars? He had to be joking!
1938
CHAPTER 17
Meeting Jory’s parents was an experience.
His mother, Ellen, was the daughter of Abel Wicks, deckhand aboard the fisheries vessel Endeavour when she was lost in a gale off Macquarie Island in December 1914. Jory told her that Ellen had been as tough as boots back in the day, but not now. Now she was a complication of bones held together in a bag of yellow skin, a whisper that trembled in the otherwise silent room. Yet she was only in her fifties. Her eyes hunted the air as she tried to speak to this newly acquired daughter-in-law, but whether the gurgle of what might have been words signified blessing or curse Marina could not tell, while the air inside the room shook with the endless concussion of the seas.
It was hard to hold the skeletal hand but she made herself do it. Jory’s mum, she told herself. This is Jory’s mum.
Father Marrek was a different proposition, as hard and unyielding as the rock upon which his house stood. The first words past his lips when she entered the house were addressed not to her but to Jory.
‘How much meat did he give you?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘What? Not a chop? Not even a sausage?’
‘I told you. Nothing.’
‘You go halfway round the island, stay a week with the local butcher, and come back with nothing? What kind of man are you?’
Newcomer or not, Marina thought to say a word in Jory’s defence. ‘Bloke like Rascal Rogers, you’re lucky he didn’t charge you rent.’
Marrek’s head turned slowly on his broad shoulders. Blue-chip eyes focused on her, as though seeing her for the first time.
‘I don’t recall asking your opinion,’ he said.
And turned his back. No Welcome to my house, not even Who the hell are you? Nothing.
Jory had already told her his dad was not a man convinced of the value of work, but it was the eyes that put her on her guard. Small and close-set, they seemed to lay claim to everything they saw, Marina included. She was anxious to accommodate, up to a point, yet instinct warned that eyes like that might mean trouble down the track.
The house had two bedrooms plus a third that was little more than a cupboard. With Jory’s mother dying in the biggest room and Marrek showing no inclination to move from the second one, it was the cupboard for Jory and Marina. It was not what she’d expected or wanted but she supposed it would do for the present.
Her mother-in-law, poor lady, was not long for this world so Marina assumed that when she went there would be a new arrangement. Already she could see how the room might be brightened by a coat of fresh paint and the addition of curtains to what at present was a bare window.
But Marrek’s blue eyes menaced her. ‘Don’t get no notion of changing things,’ he said. ‘Nothing here’s gunna change. Okay?’
CHAPTER 18
She’d come to a harsh, hard place, sure enough, a country of stone, wild seas and wilder weather, but Marina had always been game for a challenge and took this one in her stride. She would not simply survive; she would prosper. But first she would have to get the better of Jory’s dad, who she suspected had no interest in her prospering. He was a proud man; that she would have been willing to accept had it been pride in his own abilities and achievements, but it was not. His pride, barren as the stone upon which his house had been built, depended not on what he had done but on what others had done before him. To make things worse, what he claimed they’d done were not matters she would have expected any half-decent man to take pride in.
‘Eighteen fifty-six we come here,’ he told her. ‘Eighty-two year since. Trevelyan land. My granddaddy built this place. Built it from guts and looted timber, by God! And his granddaddy and his brother come out from Cornwall.
‘Coverack men! You know what Coverack men was, missy? They was wreckers, luring ships on the rocks so they could plunder them. Wreck the ship, kill the crew, sell the cargo! The way to grow rich, missy. The way to grow rich! That’s the sort of men we are, missy. ’Tis in the blood. Wreckers! Come down to us from the past.’
He pointed through the salt-smeared window at the surf roaring in from the west.
‘I see ’em now, missy. I see ’em out there. Wreckers we was and wreckers we’ll always be! And dead men tell no ta
les!’
She saw that he hoped to scare her, to make her a subservient shadow he could control, as Jory had told her he’d succeeded in controlling his wife. Good luck with that, she thought. But for the moment she said nothing, keeping her feelings locked away where he couldn’t find them.
Not that he didn’t try.
‘You need to learn your place, missy,’ he said. ‘A woman’s place. Learn it fast. I’ll have no uppity women in my house, by God!’
Something else he told her:
‘I don’t believe in idle hands. In my house, you don’t work, you don’t eat.’
Not that he was much of a worker himself. He claimed to be a seine fisherman working out of Strahan, but more often than not did no work at all. The weather was too uncertain, the seas too rough, the owner’s son wanted to try his hand at the game …
Always there were excuses, stories, lies, and Marina came to realise that work did not feature among the headlands of Marrek’s life. All in all, you had to wonder how he got by at all. Admittedly there were the sheep, and the land, and high on the Wombat Ridge a kiltful of highland cattle with shaggy coats well able to weather the weather, their twisted horns long enough to scare a bullfighter, but there was no income from cattle and sheep except at shearing or slaughtering time. Yet Marrek Trevelyan never seemed short of a quid. Where did it come from?
Occasionally he drove a truck for Walter Wilkins, the grain merchant. Maybe that was the explanation. But when she asked Jory, he said Walter Wilkins was the meanest man God had put breath in, and Marrek himself said he only did it for beer money. ‘A man gotta have his beer money,’ he told her.
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