The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  There they held throughout the afternoon until darkness fell. All night the gales raged in their fury. Also, a deep moaning could be heard coming from the direction of the Wheel, rising now and then to an enormous piping and whistling: the voice of a far-off hurricane. And strange flashes could be seen high in the night, great sheets of blue, as if of lightning, illuminating the remote upper flanks of the mountain, though there were no storm clouds present. Cook postulated in his journal that it was perhaps some strange and monstrous cousin to St Elmo’s fire—though this explanation did little, he admitted, to dispel the unearthly menace of the sight, or to make any less terrible the howling of the wind.

  But towards dawn the storm finally eased, and by sunrise the wind had dropped and the sky was clear. Cautiously, Cook took his ships back east, and finding no adverse conditions, returned to the landing point of the day before, where the two sailors—their names were Barnabas Clover and Orald Makepeace—had been marooned.

  There was no sign of them.

  Bligh was sent ashore again, with a search party. The tilted slab was bare of any trace of the men, as was the shelf above, the most obvious place for them to shelter. But one of the searchers spied a shred of colour high upon the buttress of rock that Bligh and the two men had climbed the day before. Up went Bligh once more, but what he discovered was confounding. The men were not there, but they had been, for jammed hard into a crevice were two sets of clothing: pants, shirts, jackets, shoes, everything. Clothes, but of the men themselves, nothing.

  What had happened? Why had the men ascended to the exposed buttress? Even in calm weather the climb was a precarious one; in the storm of yesterday it would have been horrifying.

  Had they been forced to do so? Had the waves, driven beyond all comprehension, threatened the shelf, itself a hundred and fifty metres high, and compelled the men on to the buttress? And even if that was so, why had they removed their clothes? Why had they rendered themselves so defenceless in such bitter wind and cold? And where were they now? Had the gale finally plucked them from the height? Or had the sea risen two hundred metres, and swept them away?

  The questions were never to be answered, for despite a full day’s search, no further signs of Barnabas Clover or Orald Makepeace, not even a smear of blood or a tuft of hair, were to be found.

  Sorrowful, Cook sailed off eastwards the next morning, leaving the Wheel and the mystery behind. He had only ever intended this visit to the mountain to be a detour. Despite all its wonders of size and terror, the Wheel offered no prospects for settlement or exploration. Cook and his ships had more important business waiting in the Pacific.

  It is worthy to note that Cook, and later explorers, found no suggestion that the Wheel had ever been previously visited or inhabited by humans. Nor has any modern investigation. The indigenous nations of present-day Australia and New Zealand make no claim over it. Separated from the nearest land by over two thousand kilometres of deep ocean, the Wheel, it seems, has stood eternally apart from humanity.

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  It was some years before the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England (leaving Cook himself dead in Hawaii) and it was then that the misunderstanding about the mountain’s name arose.

  The source of the problem was Cook’s account of the voyage, published posthumously. Not that it was his fault. Cook’s writings on the matter were perfectly clear, calling the mountain The Red Wall. And so it is inscribed on his original charts. However, thanks to a careless typesetter during the printing of the first edition of Cook’s journal, the Red Wall became, on the new map, The Red Wheel.

  It was an obvious error, one that was corrected in later editions. But in one of those quirks of history it was the erroneous name that prevailed, first purely as slang, later as the mountain’s title de rigueur.

  Why was this so? Perhaps the mistaken name endured merely out of a sense of black humour, for which mariners and mountain climbers alike are known. And after all, when viewed on a map, the great crescent described by the mountain does indeed look like one half of the rim of a giant wheel, with little Theodolite Isle forming the hub.

  But perhaps there was an even deeper recognition in play. For as the years would show, the mountain would treat those who challenged it, seafarers and climbers alike, much as it had the luckless Clover and Makepeace—that is, with a mysterious and unremitting cruelty. And in this regard, could it not be said that the mountain was akin to the infamous instrument of medieval torture, the breaking wheel?

  Either way, the name stuck.

  ▲

  But forget Clover and Makepeace for a moment: the Wheel proved no friend to any of its discoverers. Consider the fate of Gerrit Jansz, the first to glimpse the mountain, but doomed to centuries of obscurity rather than being given the fame he deserved. Or consider du Fresne, credited with the find, yes, but dead only a few months afterwards, killed by Maori warriors before he could stake his claim to history.

  Or consider James Cook, most famous mariner of his age, likewise cut down in Hawaii, only months after his visit to the Wheel.

  And as for Bligh in his later years, well …

  Need we go on?

  5

  ARRIVAL

  The mood on the ship was an unhappy one. Even secluded in her executive suite, Rita could sense it. One glance at the sky from her private balcony—tastefully fitted out with a bar, fire-pit and six-person spa—was enough to tell her why. Low cloud spread from horizon to horizon, and according to the weather forecast it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  For her three thousand fellow guests on board the Southern Wanderer the clouds represented a disaster. This was the very last cruise of the autumn season. In only two days the waters about the Wheel would close to recreational traffic for the winter, and the Wanderer must return to Melbourne. But if the skies did not clear before then, then the Wheel itself—which had hidden stubbornly behind the clouds for a day already—might not be sighted at all. And there were no refunds. The weather was in the lap of the gods, not the cruise directors.

  The Wheel was visible, of course—at least, its lower slopes were. The Wanderer had been roaming back and forth along the mountain’s eastern shore all day, close in to cliffs that tilted back sheer from the sea. But with the cloud base at only fifteen hundred metres, the upper ninety-five per cent of the Wheel remained obscured, the world’s greatest mountain reduced to no more than a dark wall, receding away for dozens of miles to either hand. Vast, yes, but what an anti-climax.

  The ship had left Melbourne five days previously, with Rita as its most reluctant and nervous passenger. In the six weeks since her meeting with Clara Lang, her misgivings and fears about this entire enterprise had only grown. But she had been unable somehow to change her mind and refuse, so she had arrived at Station Pier as promised to board the ship.

  In fact, she arrived by limousine, another example of Walter Richman’s generosity regarding her travel arrangements, or perhaps his way of ensuring that she did not chicken out at the last moment.

  At the check-in desk, nothing was too much trouble for Mr Richman’s special guest. The first officer himself escorted Rita up to her suite, a five-room apartment on the uppermost accommodation deck. It was usually either reserved for use by the cruise line’s own directors or was rented for fifteen thousand dollars a night. And it came—Rita was embarrassed to learn—with its own butler and housemaid.

  She pleaded to be assigned to a plainer room, but her escort only laughed. The ship was otherwise fully booked, he explained, but, in any case, these were Walter Richman’s direct instructions, and not for a first officer, or even the captain, to dispute.

  So Rita resigned herself. As for the domestic help, the butler assured her—after directing her unpacking—that she need not concern herself with gratuities for himself or the housemaid. Mr Richman had already taken care of that item, and very generously at that.

  The Wanderer sailed just on sunset, slipping across Port Phillip Bay in the twilight and passing thr
ough the heads into Bass Strait just as night deepened. Rita watched the land pass from her balcony. The evening was calm, and during its crossing of the bay the great ship had glided along as smoothly as a ball on glass—but once through the heads, the vessel began to rock gently on the ocean swells.

  A light sweat broke on Rita’s forehead, and an uneasiness woke in her stomach, like seasickness—but it wasn’t seasickness, it was dread, a fear that the old madness would reach out of the past and assail her. Her eyes searched, ready for unusual waves to rise from the sea, their secret natures revealed to her alone; or for a storm, newborn and aware, to swell and come ravening forwards, battering uniquely at her.

  That’s how it had been her last time at sea, twelve years ago now, when she had booked passage for herself and Anne back to Australia, after their disastrous flight into LA. The US customs authorities had intended to simply throw them on the next flight home, but Rita had begged and wheedled until they allowed her time to organise a sea passage instead. There was no way she could have boarded another plane, she would have collapsed in screaming fits. A ship was the only way she could imagine making the return trip. A big, sturdy ship. A safe ship.

  But there were no cruise liners that sailed from Los Angeles to Australia direct, so Rita’s only option was to book their passage on a commercial vessel, taking one of the few spare cabins that such craft sometimes sold to wayfarers. And while the ship was certainly big and sturdy—in fact it was huge, a seventy-thousand-tonne container vessel—it did not turn out to be safe. Not for Rita at least.

  She should have known. She should have realised that there would be problems. There were not enough people on board. Rita and Anne were the only passengers, and otherwise there was just the thirty crew. The vessel was an empty tub, deserted of human life, and it was human life that Rita needed around her, if she was to be protected from the sea. Seventy thousand tonnes of cold, dead steel was useless.

  Oh, the voyage wasn’t as bad as the flight had been. The presences of the ocean were as immense and untameable as those of the air, yes, but they were deeper and slower in mood than the monster that had buffeted the LA flight. Still, the voyage was bad enough, and it lasted three weeks. Rita was rigid and sleepless throughout, under assault from what seemed to be an endless parade of gales and squalls and swells, their consciousnesses hammering angrily against her own.

  She was suffering through detox, too. They had no cocaine, leaving alcohol as her only defence, meaning that she spent the days either drunk, or hungover, or crazed with stress. And no doubt it was those three weeks locked in a cabin with an alternatively ranting or whimpering partner that finally convinced Anne—if the LA flight hadn’t already done so—that things were over, really over, between them. She said her goodbyes to Rita the instant the ship docked in Sydney.

  Rita had learned one thing, however. Two days short of Sydney, their ship crossed paths with a cruise liner outbound for the South Pacific, a big vessel with several thousand passengers. The two craft passed within half a mile of each other. The day was rough and squally, and Rita’s demons had been torturing her as presence after presence fleeted by—but she noted that those same squalls were mysteriously calmed as they passed over the liner. Not calmed physically, of course, the wind and waves slapped just as hard against the liner as against Rita’s ship. But the presences of the squalls, in the face of several thousand human souls, withdrew sullenly into themselves, and were silent.

  Rita swore to herself then that if—if—she was ever forced to sea again, she would do so only amid a similar crowd. Not that she intended to go to sea again, or for that matter to ever again leave the Australian mainland, by any means of travel. She swore that, too. And for twelve years she had held to her vow. But now here she was, on a ship venturing by night into the wilds of Bass Strait, one of the most storm-strewn stretches of ocean in the world. No wonder she was nervous. What if she was wrong? What if, after all these years, she found that the protection of the crowd was not enough, and that she had put her head into the lion’s jaw?

  But in fact that first night passed without event. The weather stayed fair and Bass Strait remained benign, and by the next dawn the Wanderer had rounded the north-east corner of Tasmania. From there they spent a leisurely day tracking down the east coast, lingering by the cliffs and spires of first the Freycinet and then the Tasman peninsulas, before crossing Storm Bay to Bruny Island. By evening light they passed down Bruny’s sheer coast to its many-pillared tip, and then on to the Friars, a tiny collection of seal-crowded isles that were the last southern outliers of Tasmania. Then, leaving all shores behind to the north, the Wanderer steamed on directly into the wilderness of the Southern Ocean.

  Now the weather kicked up a little. After all, autumn was almost gone and winter was nigh. Waves reared, the wind blustered cold, and clouds scudded overhead. But the Wanderer, a mammoth craft fitted with the latest in stabilisation gear, was equal to the challenge, forging on smoothly into the swell. Not only did Rita remain free from seasickness, but her older malady held off as well. She could not say whether this was because she was truly rid of it after so long, or because the thousands of people around her were crowd enough to drown out any other influence, or because, to be honest, she was half-drunk much of the time. But either way she sensed no awareness in any of the passing storms, and perceived no consciousness in the rolling waves.

  She spent the days in her suite, reading novels or staring at movies on any of the four giant screens, sipping wine all the while. The ship offered other diversions—rock climbing, wave surfing, ice skating, live shows, a casino—but none appealed, even less so did the idea of company. She stayed in for every meal, delivered by her faithful butler, and refused even the standing offer of a seat at the captain’s table.

  Otherwise, she waited—along with everyone else—for the Wheel to appear.

  According to the ship’s enthusiastic guidebook, the mountain should have made its entrance on the morning of their second day at sea. Keen-eyed passengers, said the book, could hope at dawn to spy, peeping over the southern horizon, the summit of the Wheel, ‘ethereal, glowing red in the light of the unrisen sun’, even though the mountain would still be several hundred kilometres away at the time. (In perfect conditions, informed the book, the peak of the Wheel could sometimes be visible from close to an astounding five hundred kilometres distance.)

  But though Rita was up and watching from her balcony, the southern horizon that morning was a haze of broken cloud and sea spray, and nothing of the great peak was visible. No matter, assured her butler, no doubt at some point during the day the sky would clear and the Wheel would reveal itself, marching slowly up to its impossible heights.

  Only it never did. The clouds remained all day, only to blow away frustratingly at nightfall, and then by the next dawn, infuriatingly, fog had come instead, followed by rain. By then the chance to view the great wonder from afar was gone anyway. Late that afternoon, in a steady, depressing downpour, the ship came within the lee of the Wheel’s eastern shore, and the first part of the voyage was over.

  The mountain loomed immediately above them now, and should have been a spectacular sight, climbing away to the stratosphere—but, other than its dreary lower ramparts, the Wheel remained as invisible as ever in the clouds. And so it stayed for the next day as well, the rain and the fog and the cold equally miserable and unending, which left the ship and its passengers only one more day before they must depart.

  Rita’s butler brought her a report from the main dining rooms of the passengers’ mutterings. Why did the Wanderer have to hasten away, why couldn’t they stay until the cloud finally cleared? Why was the deadline for departure so strict? Why were these waters closed to cruise ships for three months a year? By whose authority?

  Well, answered the staff patiently, it was done by authority of the Australian government, to whom these waters belonged. As for the exact reason why, sadly the staff did not have that information at hand—but every passenger had
a theory of their own. Some said it was for security purposes: there was a secret military base on Theodolite Isle, everyone knew that. Others said it was environmental: certain schools of fish bred in these waters in the winter and must not be disturbed. Or maybe it was whales, not fish. And, anyway, said still others, there was no point hanging around in winter, the weather was always like this, raining nine days out of ten. In fact, it was crazy to have come this late in autumn in the first place, the cruise line should never have allowed it.

  But Rita’s butler, after he had recounted all such theories, gave an austere wink. ‘Pure bunkum, of course. You’d know the truth of it, ma’am, I’m sure, being a friend of Mr Richman’s and all.’

  Rita didn’t know anything, but hardly felt she could admit to it, and so remained, like the other passengers, in ignorance.

  However, there was at least one special treat in store for everyone. The captain announced it on the eve of their final day: the ship would be making a detour to the waters on the western side of the mountain—normally restricted territory. What was more, they would be visiting, and actually landing at, the mysterious Theodolite Isle, home not only to various secretive installations (the nature of which the captain was not at liberty to divulge) but also to the newly completed residence of the famous Walter Richman. Such a docking, in fact, was a privilege that had never been granted to any cruise ship before now. And it was all for the sake of a particular passenger now on board.

  Rita, hearing this announcement over the intercom in her suite, could only wince. Lord. After a build-up like that, the whole ship would be watching in fascination when she disembarked. Maybe she should have taken the damned helicopter after all.