Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  They got married, Hatchet Harcourt and the woman who thought she was going to tame him. It was a great occasion. Money flowed like champagne. The snowy marquees, the caviar, the smoked salmon and wedding cake. The sunlit air gleamed like a cascade of bubbles. Half the big names of the city were there, pirouetting figures on the carousel of a jewelled and magnificent clock.

  After guests and media had departed, Mr and Mrs Harcourt retired via stretch limo to the suite that had been accorded the honour of witnessing their post-nuptial consummations. Which they might have celebrated at once — the much-admired dress crushed and discarded on the floor, the peeled white wand of Anna’s body emerging like a Botticelli Venus from a foam of lingerie and troubling memories — had it not been for a final engagement which they had both agreed must be honoured.

  Dinner in a private room where their future was toasted by a dozen hand-picked and influential guests. Chairman of this. With wife. Managing director of that. With, but discreetly, someone else’s wife. Those who inhabited the upmost pinnacles of the mountain to which both bride and groom so ardently aspired.

  ‘Planning on starting a dynasty?’

  Laughter climbing on the back of champagne, but decorously. No one in this company was likely to put a foot wrong.

  Moderate backslapping, cheek-kissing; it was over. Or just begun. Afterwards, lovemaking almost put out the lamps of memory.

  The alien rhythms, the dust rising, the almond eyes shining in the closed and guarded room. The subsequent goading of flesh and spirit, the frenzied night ride into sunrise.

  Almost.

  ‘There’s a vineyard in my life, too,’ she had told him, early in their acquaintance. At once Mostyn, obsessed with vineyards, had been interested. She told him about Oudekraal, the place it had come to have in her life.

  ‘You sound as though you’re half in love with it,’ he had said, amused by feminine frailty.

  Instinct put her on guard, denying what she suspected was the truth. ‘I wouldn’t say that …’

  When they had decided to marry, she had suggested honeymooning in South Africa, where she could show him the farm, introduce him to Oudekraal’s owner.

  ‘Not South Africa.’ Mostyn, ever conscious of the importance of political correctness, shook his head regretfully. ‘Anywhere else …’

  The citadel of apartheid was a no-no. Instead they flew first class to France, where Mostyn had interests in a number of vineyards.

  They spent a week doing Paris — the Louvre, the Bois de Boulogne, Notre Dame, the palace of this, the chateau of that. To please Anna, they wandered along the quays of the Seine, watching the reflections in the water flowing beneath the old stone bridges. They inspected the work of artists, climbed the slopes of Montmartre, ate at pavement cafes. They braved the homicidal rush of traffic.

  The second week they travelled to Bordeaux and then to Burgundy, visiting the vineyards that were Mostyn’s obsession. It seemed foolish to miss the opportunity, while they were in Europe, to examine the prospects for future investment.

  He would have gone to Germany, had Anna permitted, had suggested he fly over on a quick trip, leaving her to go shopping in Paris. Indignantly, she rejected the idea. He considered she was being foolish but, for the sake of harmony, went along, thinking well of himself for doing so.

  Shopping, indeed, thought Anna crossly. Lots of bedroom ceilings — that was what she intended to see. It was what honeymoons were for, wasn’t it? Germany could wait.

  Still, she couldn’t complain; she saw several ceilings. In between, they inspected vineyards. It was September and the grapes were ready. They, too, were being harvested. Anna wondered if they felt as she did, ripe and bursting with desire under the late-summer sun. Machines trundled between rows of vines that oppressed the earth with their geometric regularity. Here and there, knots of hand-pickers in blue shirts, arms sienna-brown, deftly cut the heavy bunches and placed them in the wicker containers they drew on iron wheels behind them. One of the oldest of rituals, the whole world caught up in a slow and timeless celebration of the fecundity of the earth, with themselves as spectators.

  ‘Stop the car,’ she commanded.

  Startled, Mostyn did so. Anna got out and walked off the ribbon of burning bitumen into the vines. The leaves, a green forest with here and there a hint of lemon and russet, surrounded her. This section had not been harvested; the grapes hung, the bloom still on them. She lifted a bunch gently on its stalk. It weighed heavy in her palm.

  Like my own breasts, she thought, when I inspect them before the mirror.

  A strip of grass ran down the middle of the row and suddenly, urgently, she wanted her husband. Here, on the grass between the endless rows of vines bearing their offerings of grapes. She turned to where he stood by the open door of the car. He looked perplexed, not too well pleased. She had found already that he resented anything he did not understand or approve — in his wife, most of all. She suspected he would not approve of this, but did not care. The slowly moving pickers were far away on the other side of the valley.

  ‘Come here …’

  He came. He thought she had found something; in a sense, perhaps she had.

  ‘What is it?’

  She took hold of him. ‘This.’

  He was startled. That she could understand. Upset, too, which was harder to forgive.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Whispering, as though they were surrounded by ears, by eyes.

  ‘What do you think?’ Hand moving.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  And she was determined to prove it, had to prove it, although why she could not have said. He did nothing, so she did. Her fingers worked his zipper. He sprang out. She had him. She went to kneel on the ground before him, the weight of the sun on her back, the weight of the unharvested grapes within her flesh, her bursting loins. He stepped back, hands batting frantically at Anna’s hands.

  ‘No!’ He turned, scurrying back to the car, hands hauling his trousers tight.

  She watched, angry and humiliated. Worse than that: bereft.

  They flew back to Sydney. In her mind and heart Anna still carried the scar of what had not happened.

  Had it been so much to ask?

  I would like to celebrate my hundredth year lying with my husband amid the rows of vines, she thought. She smiled at the incongruous vision, prepared to believe they might both be past it by then.

  How would we have felt if we had gone to Africa? she wondered. Making love out in the open, under the sky of Africa; the idea made her shiver.

  How many times had Anneliese done it? she wondered. Outspanned upon the banks of rushing streams, the water ice-cold, the mountains towering overhead, with beyond them the galaxies, diamond-bright … Upon the open veld, amid the scents and emptiness of Africa, the camp-fire to keep away hyena …

  It was hardly something you could ask your great-grandmother, so she never had. It didn’t matter; Anna was convinced she knew. Hundreds and hundreds of times. And in Australia, too, on that long meandering journey northwards through the continent’s emptiness, with the two children and Dominic beside her. Anneliese had told her so much about it, although not that, of course. Never mind. She knew the answer; what she wanted to be the answer. Hundreds and hundreds of times.

  EIGHTEEN

  For years they trekked across the empty land. The outside world meant nothing to them. Rumours of strikes, of fires and floods, passed them by. Even the death of the king Anneliese had loathed so passionately meant nothing now. If they continued to preach hatred to the boys, it was from habit and because it had become its own justification. Hatred and the children — without them their lives would have meant nothing. Without Anneliese’s son Sean, in particular. Sean was tough, always filthy, quick as sunlight. From the first, after he started running about, he had the knowing look of someone much older. Anneliese found it hard to remember that he had ever been a baby w
ho relied on her for everything; Sean and helplessness were worlds apart.

  He was as direct as a blade. When he wanted something he went straight for it, like a thrust for the jugular. He wanted so many things. Things he could carry off, hide like a dog burying a bone. He shared nothing.

  Anneliese continued to love him with the passionate, unreasoning love that she had felt from the moment of his birth, the love that had first overwhelmed and then excluded all else, but there were times when his black, monkey’s eyes, hard as glass, troubled her too. One day, when Sean was four, they arrived at a river. It was mostly dry, but with pools here and there reflecting the brilliant sky like mirrors of emerald.

  Water in this arid land was usually too precious for washing but here, in the emerald pools, there was enough to wash them all.

  ‘Get your clothes off,’ Anneliese told Sean. ‘You’re filthy.’

  He was, dust in every nook and cranny of his body. She dragged off his clothes, despite his squawks. Rivulets of mud had hardened on his skin, yet his body had the sweetness of a young animal.

  She washed him in the algae-thick water, scrubbing with a cloth while he squirmed indignantly, fish-slippery between her hands. The slender stalk of neck. The head poised and alert, arrogant even now. She scrubbed under his arms, despite his protests. She ran the cloth over the velvet skin of his body, along the line of ribs like the fingers of a bony hand. She scrubbed between his legs, the taut buttocks and jutting, small-boy’s pod, the sturdy legs and dirt-encrusted toes. Each time she did this she felt as though she were shaping him again from the clay of her own flesh, a rebirth filling her with awe that she had been the agent in the creation of so perfect a being.

  She would have liked so much to play with him, but that he would not permit. He tolerated what she was doing, barely, but as soon as she had finished, his skin scarlet from the cloth, he was off up the bank to stand naked and unashamed in the hard sunlight. He stood looking down at her, chest thrown out, head back, and she saw Jack Riordan in him, the bones of the eagle head already plain, the stance that challenged the world. Then he turned and ran off, secure and entire as only a young male, conscious of strength to come, could be.

  That was the day Anneliese and Dominic first fell out over him. Afterwards she could not remember what Sean had done; given cheek, most probably — he was always one for that.

  ‘Time I took my strap to him,’ Dominic said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or he will grow up wild.’

  Let him, Anneliese thought, if wildness is his destiny. No one is going to tame him while I have breath.

  Aloud she said, ‘Don’t you dare.’

  Stares, then. ‘Are you threatening me, woman?’

  Her fury erupted. ‘I’ve stayed with you every step of the way. Always. Even when we were settled at the Faircloughs I left with you rather than have us divided. Sean is your child’ — she would go to the rack before she admitted the possibility of anything else — ‘but if you take your belt to him, I swear we shall all leave you at the next town.’

  Face hot with rage, he raised his hand. She thought he was going to hit her. She stared, challenging him, and at length his hand fell. He turned away, and Anneliese knew that she had beaten him. She watched as he stamped off through the bush, booted feet kicking dust. He was gone a long time but, like herself, had nowhere else to go. He would be back.

  Yet, in truth, that was the day when part of him stayed away forever. Dominic saw, finally, that Anneliese had turned her face from him and the shutters came down over his heart. For a long time, he said as little to her as he could. As for Sean … it was as though he did not exist.

  Instead he tried to make up to Dermot, unsuccessfully. Dermot evaded him, as he did the rest of them. He was a gentle boy; Anneliese had always been convinced he was too fine for the life they led. Through his eyes, she watched the changing colours of the bush, the panoply of stars above their nightly camps. A dozen times she sat with him, trying to make contact, but it was no use. They had nothing to say to each other.

  From the first, Dermot had known that the most important things in the world were the ones you couldn’t see. Dreams. The watching faces of the forest. Sometimes he thought life was lived at two levels, the dreams incomparably more important than the people and things about him.

  He had always wanted attention. He could no longer remember his earliest days, yet they had marked him forever. There had been no time for stories, then. No inclination, either; neither Carmel Riordan nor Jack had been the sort to sit down with a baby and tell him the fantasies he craved.

  ‘I’m too busy.’

  ‘Don’t be bothering me now, Dermot.’

  The first seeds of deprivation. Yet there had been other seeds, also planted before memory. The flare of his imagination had illuminated the forest, the sky, the horses tossing their manes in the yard behind the house. Spirit horses had peopled his sleep, so that he was aware before he was aware of anything of the dimensions of the invisible.

  The woman who had appeared one day seemed to share his dreams. With her he saw the spirit horses, the black wings of the forest spread wide to enfold him. He went with her and the man; the world changed. He learned to give them names: Ma and Dominic.

  Even the texture of the light was different, no longer the green air of the woods, but the harsh brightness of an endless space.

  A river somewhere. A vastness of light, the smell of wet, the fingers of things poking emerald out of mud. The woman and man screaming at each other. Fury’s spiked shadows haunting sleep.

  Afterwards, the woman had less time for dreams. There was another child, upon whom she focused all her attention. Dermot was aware of an emptiness, the aching vacuum of non-love. He looked for her but could no longer find her, came to understand that she was wholly taken up with the baby.

  It did not occur to him to hate the newcomer but perhaps a part of him hated. Increasingly, he wandered through the forest of his imaginings. The other world — of touch and smell and sound — was there still but increasingly unimportant, as though the branches of his secret forest conspired with him against the light.

  There it was that Dominic found him.

  They’d had little to do with each other before but now, as though he too had fallen out of the sunshine of the woman’s love, Dominic joined the child in the half-darkness. Did more than join him; he peopled the enchanted wood with tales of splendour, of songs and triumphs and glories, of Taliesin the harpist and Cuchulainn the giant, of wrongs done, of lives spilled again and again over the centuries, of vengeance crying from the blood-stained earth.

  It troubled Dermot that such cruelties should exist. ‘But who did these things?’

  ‘The English.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the evil that is in them.’

  ‘When I am older I shall fight them. Fight for Ireland.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  The baby who was a baby no longer became an intrusion, moving into spaces Dermot had taken for granted were his own. It snatched away the things it wanted, as it had earlier snatched away the woman’s love. Sean’s will was diamond-edged; Dermot sensed already that he would never be able to stand against it. Sean took what he wanted, always; got away with it, always. Increasingly, Dermot came to accept that he was second-best in all things.

  His dream forest remained his sanctuary, his salvation. Dominic still joined him there, but less frequently. He too had changed, become morose, his voice often thick and tangled, raving incomprehensibly. Then Ma would come and drive him away. The muddled ravings would sag first into incoherence, then headlong into sleep, snores shaking the walls of whatever shelter they were in.

  A muddle of years. Of which one episode remained, star-bright.

  Sean, his own hat lost or merely mislaid, snatching at Dermot’s, screeching, I want it, I want it.

  Dermot, four years older, twelve against eight, held him off, at first good-naturedly despite the scarlet rage painti
ng Sean’s face, the lashing fists and feet.

  You can’t have it, Sean.

  Who fought still, silent, ferocious, focused.

  Such unnatural intensity alarmed Dermot. Awareness of his own feelings infuriated him. He shoved Sean away, violent in his turn, so that Sean fell. He rebounded and bore in, screaming. As though nothing but death would stop him.

  Anneliese’s arm and urgent face, separating them.

  Dermot, be patient with your brother.

  He’s not my brother. His own rage, spurting. He’s not, he’s not!

  Dermot! A slap, ear echoing. Be silent!

  Suddenly it was too much. He seized the hat from his own head and flung it down. Take it, then.

  At once Sean, no longer screeching, snatched it and bore it off: not in triumph but silently, resentfully, as though he were the one affronted.

  The woman’s eyes like fire. Don’t you take that tone with me, young man.

  Later, he heard the two grown-ups talking.

  I don’t understand what got into him.

  Sean got into him, that’s what. A good punch in the head, that’s what Sean’s needing. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll be getting it, too, before he’s much older.

  Dermot had better not try.

  Not from Dermot. Me.

  Dominic, incoherent or not, became his friend.

  Anneliese watched as aggravation deepened between the two boys. It was not a case of the younger standing up to the elder; in all things, Sean was the aggressor, yet could no more help himself than could the fire that swept before the wind, devouring all in its path.

  For the moment Dermot was safe, the four years between them wide enough for breathing space but, as they grew older, the gap would narrow, and Anneliese feared for Dermot and his place in their little world.