Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  A shrug. ‘So you say.’

  Again they watched each other under the hissing kerosene lantern. In the darkness the bugs pinged against the screens.

  ‘What’ll it take to make you change your mind?’

  ‘You already know that.’

  The next evening Scott Macdonald called them together in the homestead’s shabby living room; Scott himself, with Sylvia beside him, Sean and Anneliese and Dermot.

  There was a table with drinks, bottles and glasses. Macdonald gave them each a glass. Stood and beamed, while Dermot wondered what was going on.

  ‘When Gavin died I thought my life had come to an end,’ Scott told them. ‘Now it’s only a few days since Dominic was killed, too. I mourn him as a friend. We all do. But we can’t go on living in the past. We have to look to the future.’

  Dermot thought, He’s asked Ma to marry him. He glanced at her but her face was too cool and white for it to be that.

  ‘Anneliese,’ Macdonald said, ‘I’m only sorry Dominic isn’t with us tonight.’

  She nodded, the barest movement, and Dermot realised that she, at least, knew what this was all about.

  Macdonald raised his glass. ‘Sylvia has told me she and Sean are to be married. I am very pleased to give my approval.’

  Dermot could not believe it. Mouth working, he stumbled forward. ‘But —’

  Anneliese grabbed his hand, pulling him back. ‘Be quiet, Dermot.’

  Rage but terror, too, feeling himself intimidated by the eyes watching him. Like I’m still a kid, he thought.

  ‘No! Sylvie and I —’

  Macdonald did not even have to raise his voice to silence him.

  ‘Shut up, Dermot! This is nothing to do with you.’

  Dermot stared at Sylvia in horror. Say something, his eyes implored her. Tell them we’re going away.

  Dermot had never spoken to her father, despite his promise, but that was him all over. Yet it was still not too late. Even now she waited for him to speak. She thought, They’re fighting over me. It gave her a pleasurable feeling, quite exciting.

  Only there was no fight. Dermot squawked once, then his mother yanked at his hand again and he collapsed. Like a kid. She watched him. It was hopeless. She would have to mother him all her life, make all the decisions. How could she ever hope to keep herself safe, doing that?

  No, there was more security in the strong man than the weak. She looked hard at Dermot for what seemed a long time, then made her choice.

  She moved to Sean’s side and took his hand in hers.

  It was as though the tree had fallen a second time.

  Dermot knew that staying was out of the question. Later that night, he sought Anneliese out. ‘Reckon I’ll try my luck further south,’ he said, taking care not to look at her.

  She had learned years ago to face reality. ‘It might be best. For a while. You can come back later, if you want. There will always be room for you here.’

  Dermot had expected her to try to talk him out of it, had stiffened himself to resist her entreaties. Now this. She doesn’t care, he thought. Nobody cares.

  He could not bring himself to speak to Sylvia. Would not have spoken to Sean, either, but it was impossible to avoid him.

  ‘I shan’t be under your feet for long.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  His indifference was like a lash about Dermot’s shoulders. He wanted to let Sean know how he felt about the way he’d been treated. He tried, spluttering and stammering, but it was hopeless.

  Sean cut him off before the protests were halfway out of his mouth. ‘This is a tough country, Dermot. You’re not cut out for it.’

  Dermot hated him for putting the truth into words but said nothing; Sean was right. He turned and blundered away.

  Later, brooding in his room, humiliation a mountain crushing him into the dirt, he thought that maybe he should kill Sylvia or Sean or himself. Perhaps I should kill the lot of us, he thought. Make a proper job of it.

  Certainly it would be something to remember him by. They wouldn’t think he was of no account, then. He imagined Sean’s face, his voice pleading frantically for mercy. Sylvia’s tears …

  Rubbish, of course.

  Now she was to lose him, Anneliese’s love for Dermot had returned in full measure. No, she thought, that is wrong. I always loved him, but somehow lost the way of showing it to him, or myself.

  She had neglected him so much. There was no excuse. She could pretend she had always had too much to do, trying and trying to make sense out of the shipwreck of their lives, and it would be true, as far as it went, yet not the real truth. From the first day she had been there for Sean, but for neither Dominic nor Dermot had she found a place.

  Sean, whom she no longer even liked, the strong and ruthless man who, seeing his chance, had knifed his brother as casually as he would have butchered a calf. Sean, who had taken her love and hidden it, as he had hidden everything he had seized in his life, giving nothing back. There was nothing she could do. From his earliest days, whenever Sean saw something he wanted, when he stood with chest thrown out, chin raised in challenge, he would take it, exactly as Jack Riordan would have taken it. Land, horse, woman — all one. There had been no gainsaying either of them. They had both been too much for her, too much for anyone.

  She had done everything she could to keep the family together; now it was broken, for all her efforts. It seemed sometimes that her whole life had been one of sacrifice. The surrender of her life in Africa had been the price she had paid for what at the time she had called justice; her denial of the passion that Jack Riordan had kindled so effortlessly had been as much for Dominic as herself; to preserve the family, she had wasted the precious days of her existence trekking from town to town across the dusty vastness of this alien land.

  To what end? Dominic was gone; Dermot was going. And Sean … Anneliese saw now that Sean had never been a part of them at all.

  She no longer knew why she had given her life to avert what she had always known was inevitable. She was alone, and would be. Scott Macdonald had grown used to her, was comfortable in her presence. She could say without vanity that she still had the power of a woman over a man. Neither of them had forgotten their silent, healing communion at the time of Gavin’s death. She thought that one day soon he would come to her. Not yet; it was too soon after Dominic’s death; unlike Sean, Scott observed the proprieties in such things — which was why, when the time came, Sean would devour him, too. Already she could feel the weight of his eyes upon her.

  It would bring them companionship, of a sort, a measure of peace to both body and spirit. As for commitment … Never. She had done with commitments in her life.

  Dermot had not wanted her to come to the train but Anneliese had insisted. For eighteen years she’d been making the decisions and saw no reason to change now.

  She realised that Dermot, whom she had called the man of the family after Dominic’s death, was dearer to her than her own son, however late she had been discovering it. After she saw him off on the train she would in all probability never see him again, but she took care to hide her feelings, from herself and the world. Instead she bossed him, believing it was the last chance she would get.

  ‘If you’re planning to catch that train, you’d better get a move on.’

  She managed not to pat him, not to straighten his shirt. She wanted so much to touch, for the last time. To let her love show. For the last time. She knew that such a display of affection would embarrass him but it was not easy to stand by, to do — and show — nothing. Separation ahead of parting — how she hated it.

  It couldn’t be helped, Anneliese told herself briskly. Bossing would have to serve. ‘Dermot, come on …’

  First they had to undergo the ritual of farewells. Scott Macdonald, grim-faced, silent. Sylvia, who had knowingly acted as a catalyst in the enmity between Dermot and Sean, smiled and smiled, hiding herself as always behind her simpering eyes. Sean was there, too, despite all. Watchful ey
es, dark hair, dark heart. His farewell was no more than a perfunctory handshake but it was better than nothing. Just.

  As well Dermot’s going, Anneliese thought. There would have been blood spilt, otherwise.

  Anneliese and Dermot climbed into the buggy for the three hours’ drive to town. Dermot took the reins — another last — and away they went, the wheels spilling a curtain of dust that cut them off at once from the group standing in front of the homestead, from everything that had made up their lives until that moment.

  They spoke little on the journey. Dermot was dearer to her than anyone living yet now she could read him less clearly than ever. The penalty for all those years of neglect, she thought, but in her heart knew that blaming herself was an indulgence. Even as a child, Dermot had inhabited his own secret world.

  ‘Sean’s right, Ma,’ he had told her. ‘I haven’t got what it takes to run Paradise Downs. I have to get away, find my own place in the world.’

  Perhaps when he’s stretched his wings he’ll be back, she told herself, but without conviction; the need to make his own way had become a symbol in Dermot’s life, and symbols were not given up so easily.

  All the same, she dreaded his going. He does not have Sean’s strength, she thought. Life could destroy him so easily.

  I shall not weep.

  She watched the countryside; the dust, the dry bush rattling by. So many journeys, she thought. The first when I was barely more than a child, travelling with my new husband across the veld to the farm that was to become my home and happiness and despair. Our way lay through the mountains. I remember how many streams there were. We saw duiker and once, with the dragon teeth of the hills all about us, there were klipspringer, the shaggy little antelope of the high places. So beautiful.

  Years later, husband dead, home burnt before her eyes, those same mountains had mocked from afar as the train had carried them all to the camp at Koffiekraal. That had been her second big journey. The first and last time with Stoffel and Amalie. Flesh of her flesh, as the Bible said. Their deaths had cast an indelible shadow over her, yet she had not thought of them for a long time. For a moment it panicked her, as though she had laid down a section of her life in a corner and could no longer find it. Life went on, daily problems took over one’s thoughts and there had to be an end to grieving. Yet to the emptiness there would be no end.

  Now, driving through the sunburnt bush, she grieved for them again. For husband and children, for the farm and life they had shared. For herself, also, another stranger who had died long ago.

  So many compartments in one’s life, she thought. Dermot never knew Dirk or the children yet they are here, at my side, as much as he is. All of them part of this woman I have become, this forty-six-year-old creature of grief and happiness, regrets and hopes, of memories and love. Love linking all; of the land that was mine, of those who peopled it. All of them woven together with Dominic and his parents, with Dermot and Sean, into a pattern so tight that none of us can ever be separated from the rest.

  Dirk, Stoffel and Amalie; Christiaan and Sara; Deneys and Elizabeth; Dominic and Dermot and Sean. Even Sarel Henning and his family. All part of the bag and baggage of her life. Others, too, travelled in the buggy with them. The children of Deneys and Dermot and Sean, the unknowable children of the future, formed a line stretching into the years ahead. Perhaps they will achieve what we have failed to do, she thought. There, at least, was hope.

  They reached Waroola at last. Dust was everywhere; staining the fronts of the buildings, lying like brown flour against the walls, flavouring the air. In a month’s time all would be mud, the tracks impassable.

  ‘Lucky you’re leaving before The Wet,’ Anneliese said. ‘Another month and we’d never have got through.’

  The Wet and The Dry had become part of her life. If I went home they would not know me, she thought. Even to speak the language would be hard. For a moment she felt a pang at the thought of all that should have been her life and was not. I would give my life to see Oudekraal again, she thought, knowing it was impossible.

  The bush, The Dry and The Wet, the laconic people who would always be strangers: these were her destiny now, forever.

  ‘Time for a cup of coffee,’ she suggested.

  ’N lekker koppie koffie, her memory mocked her. A nice little cup of coffee.

  She could have done without the nonsense. It would be hard enough to say goodbye without echoes of the past making things a hundred times worse.

  They went to the pub, ordered coffee, sat with their cups at a table in a corner. At this time of the morning the room was empty of everything but the smell of beer, the shadowy presence of all the men who had propped up the bar over the years.

  ‘Have a beer, if you’d rather,’ Anneliese suggested, knowing he would not. Neither of the boys were boozers; Dominic’s example had soured the taste of drink in their mouths.

  They sat, not alone.

  ‘Going off to make your own way. Your Dad would have been proud of you,’ she said, acknowledging the presence of one of the ghosts. Dominic would always be Dad, as she herself was Ma, his proxy mother.

  ‘He’d probably say I was a fool, turning my back on a safe job.’ But was pleased, she saw.

  She smiled grimly. ‘He’d be right.’

  ‘I had no choice, Ma.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Which exhausted all they had to say to each other. They waited in awkward silence while the gritty coffee grew cold; they gulped it down. Behind the bar a clock ticked ponderously. Finally, she could bear it no longer.

  ‘Let us go, then.’

  They crossed the road to the station, walked beside the train wreathed in steam. People stood about; at the far end of the platform men were loading what looked like mailbags.

  Anneliese spoke to a porter.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said.

  Dermot turned, bag slung over his shoulder, took her work-broken hands in his. You could trace my life in my hands, Anneliese thought.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

  She would not be able to bear it if he became emotional now.

  ‘You’ll let us know how you are?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He hovered helplessly, trapped between past and future. She took pity on him. ‘We’ll say goodbye, then.’

  Briefly they clung together. So many years reduced to this.

  He climbed into the train. She waited alone on the platform. They looked at each other through the window. He gave her a rueful half-grin; she tried to return it but could not. A whistle blew. The locomotive heaved its shoulders. Dermot raised one hand, silently. The train jolted into motion.

  Others were waving, crying, calling, running along the platform. Anneliese would not. She stood unmoving as the train rolled away. The steadily receding carriages threatened to remain in her sight forever. She watched while they grew steadily smaller, became indistinct behind a ripple of haze. The rear of the train dwindled to a speck. To less than a speck. Was …

  Gone.

  She walked back down the platform and into the hot glare. The emptiness of parting filled her, a space where formerly had been warmth. The street, the passers-by, were the same, yet everything had changed.

  She walked to the buggy, climbed into the driver’s place. She clicked her tongue; they moved forward in a light rumble of wheels. To the shop, first of all; not even saying goodbye to your son absolved you from the duty of stocking up during your visit to town.

  At last the buggy was full. With the emptiness of past and future beside her, Anneliese started her long and dusty journey back to Paradise Downs.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The 1987 crash that destroyed Bond, Skase and a thousand smaller operators only strengthened Mostyn Harcourt. He had seen what was coming, moved from real estate into cash and bonds, sat back to wait out the storm. There had been wonderful pickings afterwards, the financial beaches littered with the wrecks of foundered dreams. He
took a sizable stake in the Trumpet, the Sydney tabloid, moved into a whole range of strategic industries. He invested offshore; a tool manufacturer in Germany, a Silicon Valley investment in the States. For the first time he moved into Asia.

  Three years later, on a visit to Indonesia, he was introduced, not entirely by chance, to men close to President Suharto. Mostyn always swore that he never interfered in editorial matters but the Trumpet’s editor, always one to know which side his bread was buttered, had made no objection to publishing an article on the morning of Mostyn’s departure from Australia.

  MERCHANT BANKER HOLDS KEY TO

  INVESTMENT IN PACIFIC RIM

  The article had played up Mostyn’s role as adviser to unnamed but highly placed clients throughout the region. A phone call from a friend at the Embassy to a contact at the palace, and the transfer of a relatively modest sum to a bank account in Brunei had ensured that the right eyes saw the article.

  Within months Mostyn had become heavily involved with members of Suharto’s family in investments throughout Indonesia; real estate in Jakarta and Sourabaya, a holiday complex in Bali, a rice-milling enterprise in Central Java.

  In 1994, on his fiftieth birthday, the board of Heinrich Griffiths presented him with a golden replica of a woodcutter’s axe, mounted against a backcloth of purple velvet. He loved it, as he loved the nickname that had given rise to the gift, and ever since it had hung on the wall behind his desk.

  Now, two years later, Mostyn occupied the managing director’s office, complete with inlaid desk and Gill prints, upon which he had first set his sights years earlier. The board had approved a seven-figure package, salary plus equity tied to performance, that gave him not a majority holding but at least de facto control of the operations of the company.

  Five years before, at the beginning of the nineties, he had suffered one of his few reverses when he had failed to pick up Oudekraal. The memory still rankled. He still thought of it — and a reckoning with the stubborn bastard who owned it — as unfinished business, yet in almost every other respect he had scarcely put a foot wrong.