The Unforgiving Shore

by Gil Hogg

“The Aborigine Trustees want it. It’s an important precondition. And my mother thought it should go back. Didn’t she ever speak to you about it?” He felt calm enough to mention her.

  “I can’t remember.” Marchmont looked confused.

  “I’m not sure we can get much further with this. I think I’ll take a walk around the lawns before bed, if you’ll excuse me.” He left the room with a friendly wave.

  *

  Paul met Sophie after breakfast in the walled herb garden. They walked together. It was going to be another sultry day, but the lawns and manicured box hedges were fresh.

  “There’s a kind of dampness…” he said.

  “It’s the fens; it’s usually raining and blowing. How long are you staying?”

  “Until I’ve seen my relations, assuming I can find them.”

  “You’ll have to find out what John thinks of your proposal.”

  “I think I know. He’ll check up with Oz and decide he can win.”

  “Can he?”

  “There’s a very slight chance.”

  “I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences in telling you that after you’d gone last night, he said he’s certain the mine is on Mirabilly.”

  “And what else did he do? No, don’t tell me. Let me tell you, Sophie. He rang Sydney. ‘There’s no way the son of one of my stockmen is going to con me!’” Paul mimicked.

  “Okay, smart-guy. You got it about right. Why do you two have to behave like a couple of stags?”

  “It would mean something to me if we could settle.”

  “Paul, the bit about the stone really riled him. ‘Bloody nerve!’ he said. I said I thought it was a fair enough suggestion and that annoyed him even more. It’s a beautiful piece of art and I suppose history, isn’t it?”

  “How would I know, Sophie? I’ve never been inside the owner’s wing of the Big House.”

  *

  Paul had a ploughman’s lunch with Sophie at the Green Man; it was cheese and pickle on a chunk of bread. “They call it a shearer’s sandwich in Sydney,” he said.

  Sophie insisted that they have a pint of Mulgrew’s Special Bitter, brewed in the wood, but she couldn’t finish hers and left it for him. He liked it.

  While they were eating, he took a small leather-bound volume of the New Testament out of his pocket. He opened the cover and showed the inscription to Sophie. ‘To Ellen Colbert on her confirmation, October 1947.’ It was signed ‘Hugh Prendergast, Vicar, St George’s-by-the-Ouse.’ Ellen herself had written underneath, ‘Ellen Louise Colbert, 16 Blakiston Row, Barton, King’s Lynn.’

  “This is where the search starts, Sophie.”

  “Do you need to do this, Paul? I can’t imagine trying to search out my relatives in the backstreets of Detroit. I don’t think I’d want to know them. It’s like digging in a grave where you might find out all sorts of nasty secrets.”

  “My mother told me her story when she was dying. She had nothing to hide, but for years she was defiant about not disclosing her past. It’s not that I don’t trust what she told me. I just want to get the feel for the family’s view.”

  “She was certainly a strange woman.”

  Paul remembered how rude Ellen had been to Sophie when he introduced them years ago and she had virtually ordered Sophie to get out of the house. Ellen had instinctively loathed Sophie by proxy as the daughter of Marchmont’s mistress. But the only reservation Paul had about Sophie and what held him at bay, was her close connection with Marchmont; she worked in the publicity department of his company in New York and evidently admired him.

  *

  Sophie offered to borrow Alex’s car and drive Paul while he did his detective work. He bought a map at the Barton newsagents. They drove on to town and stopped at the Duke’s Head Hotel in Market Square to have a cup of coffee and plan their moves.

  King’s Lynn, a thriving port for coasters 150 years ago, had lost its sense of importance. Although they were seeing it on a fine day, the lash of rain and winds from the Wash had left the houses with a faded look. They navigated their way through narrow streets to the place where Ellen Colbert once lived.

  Blakiston Row was a line of red brick terraced houses, each with a narrow room and a doorway at the front and another room above; they were near an unused wharf. One or two properties in the street appeared to be occupied, but most were deserted and boarded up, including number sixteen. The houses were built close to the street. All Paul had to do was push open the creaking gate, take a pace to the doorstep and look through a crack in the front window-boards. Inside was damp, dark and appeared to be full of trash. The house was a frowning ruin that never seemed to have provided a space where you could visualise that a family had lived.

  Sophie parked Alex’s incongruous shiny red Porsche and they walked down the block to the next street. The houses were in the same decayed condition, but they found two old men talking on the pavement. The men remembered the family name, Colbert, and said that one of the girls had married a stonemason and lived ‘out Meadowcourt way’. They found St George’s Church, not by the river, but by a scrap dealer’s yard guarded by Alsatian dogs. They enquired at the nearby rectory. The parson, who answered the door, looked crumpled and dozy. After Paul had explained his mission, the parson brightened and said immediately, “Ivy Colbert married Cyril Harris, a stonemason, in this church, after his first wife died and I officiated. Poor old Cyril didn’t survive too long, but he left Ivy comfortably off. She’ll be in the phonebook.” He brought the phonebook to the door and looked up the address for them.

  They drove to the more spacious detached house of Mrs Harris in Meadow Drive, where the streets were wide and had long lawns in front. Ivy Harris had moved up the social scale from Blakiston Row. Paul was against telephoning her in advance because he felt it might be hard to identify himself as a genuine caller. “Let’s play it at the front door,” he said to Sophie.

  A heavy, sixty-ish woman, her features squeezed in a doughy face held the door open slightly and looked suspicious as Paul explained. He produced a colour photograph of Ellen, taken in the front garden of the house on the Hill, with a wattle tree and flowers in the background. The woman took it gingerly between finger and thumb. She devoured the small scene with her small eyes and opened the door. “I had a sister, Ellen.”

  She beckoned them inside. In her fleshy looks there was still a suggestion of Ellen. She invited them to sit in a lounge stuffed with furniture and ornaments, while she made tea.

  “So you’re Ellen’s boy,” she said, as she handed around a plate of scones. “And his wife,” she added as an afterthought.

  Paul didn’t correct the ‘wife’. He talked about Mirabilly without mentioning his mother’s descent from the Big House, to the Hill and then the Village, but it must have sounded like the far side of the moon to a woman for whom Norwich city was the centre of the civilised world.

  “Well there’s not much good to tell here, Nephew. Ellen got in tow with one of the local nabobs, name of Marchmont years ago. She sailed off with him in his yacht and never came back.”

  “She didn’t keep in touch?” Sophie asked.

  “Too ashamed. She left her husband, a cripple in a chair, paralysed, left him flat, left me to look after him!”

  Ivy Harris sat on the sofa with her feet together, her hands clenched in her lap and took no tea or scones herself. Sophie had opened the floodgate.

  “You see, Ellen thought this Marchmont was going to marry her. Can you imagine it? Him a high society figure and her a slushy in his mansion? You’d have to be daft to think it could happen anywhere except in story-books, wouldn’t you?”

  Ivy Harris was taut, her figure a shapeless sack, her cheeks puffed and her eyes glittering with fierce excitement.

  “Ellen first became a maid, then a lady too grand to speak to us, living on presents from this man. She always thought she was better than us. And then this Marchmont goes and dumps her on a farm at the other end of the world! She couldn’t show her fac
e here after that, could she? There was a terrible fuss. Her husband Peter killed himself with sleeping pills. Poor man, so young and handsome he was when he first went into that chair. You can understand why Ellen couldn’t hold her head up here. Nobody would give her the time of day.”

  Paul shrivelled up inside as she spoke. She was in an ecstasy of bitterness. She saw him pale.

  “It’s just the truth, Nephew. What you came here to learn.”

  A silence.

  “You haven’t had your tea, Nephew. It’ll be cold now. I’ll…”

  “We have to go,” Sophie said.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Grange,” Sophie said.

  “Goodness me, is that a hotel now?”

  “No, it’s still owned by the Marchmont family.”

  Ivy’s face shadowed. “Really?” she said, puzzled.

  Paul stood up to leave without being able to say anything. Sophie gave their thanks.

  As Ivy was showing them out, she said mildly, “Come round for tea next time you’re here, Nephew, with your wife.”

  Paul searched her face. Her eyes had receded into deep pin-pricks. She was serious.

  *

  “You’re not so lively tonight,” Marchmont remarked to Paul that night after dinner, as he shepherded him into the library for coffee.

  “I met my mother’s sister, Ivy Harris, this afternoon.”

  “Indeed?” Marchmont said, intent on the cigar-cutter and his Davidorff.

  “Yes, she told me how my mother came to leave King’s Lynn and go to Australia.”

  “Sit down, my boy and have a port.” He stretched out comfortably on the couch. “There’s often a lot of embroidery in the telling, you know.”

  “It wasn’t embroidery that you went to Australia with my mother.”

  Marchmont seemed completely at ease. “No, that much is true. We were very close before she met your father.”

  “And my mother was a maid here?” Paul looked up at the plaster cherubs on the lofty ceiling and became aware that Grayson was still fussing with the drinks tray in the corner. The conversation was about to stumble forward when Linda Ryland swept into the room.

  “Darling,” she said to Marchmont, “none of that awful old tawny port for me. Grand Marnier, please, with ice.”

  Paul excused himself and went up to his room without finishing his coffee, impatient with the idle conversation, but after about an hour Marchmont telephoned him and asked him to go to his office on the first floor. Marchmont and Sophie were there. The trio stood between the desks and office machinery.

  “I wanted to tell you the answer to your suggestion about settling the case,” Marchmont said.

  “It was, as you say, only a suggestion,” Paul said.

  “Never mind what it was. The answer is no.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Why settle for part, when I’m entitled to the whole?”

  “We didn’t start this venture without anticipating what might happen.”

  “How could you know I’d sue?”

  “Because Mirabilly has always treated the land as its own. We anticipated you’d support that. We examined the title deeds and surveyed the land long before we put a cent in.”

  “Why would we treat the land as our own if it wasn’t?”

  “Because the Gudijingi River, which was given as the boundary in the original lease, changed its course over the years and began to flow through the native land and your predecessors moved their operations with it, on to the native land.”

  Marchmont gave him a hostile glare for a moment and then softened. “We’ll see.”

  Paul thanked him for his hospitality and said he’d be leaving early in the morning. He felt calm because he had expected Marchmont’s reaction. Sophie went with him when he left the room.

  “I want to get back to the clean air and the sun,” he said to her.

  He wanted to get out of the damp smell of the old house, with layers of Marchmont history absorbed deep in its walls, even some part of the history of his mother.

  “I’m sorry you had such a bad time with Mrs Harris,” Sophie said.

  “It was never going to be fun, only something I had to do.”

  “And you never did talk to John about whether you’re his son.”

  “I never intended to, Sophie. Now, all there is on this subject, is a page of notes taken by a drunken lawyer twenty something years ago.”

  “I know it’s kinda late now, Paul. You don’t need a father, but isn’t it important for both of you that you know? A DNA test would prove it.”

  “Sophie, for Marchmont to accept that he was my father would mean admitting a whole lot of things he’d rather forget. It’s not going to happen. It’s all too late.”

  “Perhaps you’re right… John would have a terrible sense of deprivation. I know what he would have made of a son. Alex is adopted and frankly he’s useless; Emma’s nice but more interested in being fashionable. John treats me as a kind of quasi-son.”

  “I’ll probably get away before breakfast,” Paul said, when they were outside his room and he kissed her on each cheek very formally. And then he kissed her properly.

  “Call me when you’re in New York,” she said. “And even when you’re not. I like you, Paul.”

  “Let me get this visit behind me.”

  His feelings for Sophie Ryland had outlived a number of his girlfriends in the Territory, but at that moment he was too caught up in the echoes of Marchmont and his mother to deal with her.

  *

  At 6am in the morning Paul was coming down the main stairway of the Grange with his bag over his shoulder. Grayson was waiting at the foot of the stairs, round-shouldered and fully attired in his white shirt with a black bow tie and a frock coat.

  “I’ve ordered your taxi, sir. It should be here at any moment.”

  “Thanks, Grayson. You didn’t need to be here. I could have managed.” Paul thought he looked anxious.

  “Some breakfast, sir, surely? The cab will wait.”

  “No, I haven’t enough time, thanks. I’ll get off.”

  Grayson drew himself up it seemed with effort. “May I ask a question, sir?”

  “Certainly.”

  His thin lips quivered as he prepared to address Paul. “It’s about… Ellen Colbert.”

  “My mother. She’s dead, Grayson. Cancer. She told me about you. She liked it here. She was very fond of you.”

  Grayson bowed his head slightly. It seemed more than he expected to hear. “She… said that?”

  “She did. She said that when she was here, if she had been free to marry, you were the sort of man she would have wanted. And tell me, how did she get on here?”

  “We all cared for Ellen. She brought joy to all those around her.”

  Paul clattered down the steps to the cab, leaving the old man with wet eyes.

  18

  Sophie Ryland felt excited as she reclined in her seat after the aircraft had attained cruising height. She had a dizzy-high feeling from a first glass of champagne.

  The Marchmont team were flying from JF Kennedy Airport, New York, to Sydney. Sophie was in the main cabin of the business jet with Sean Donnelly her assistant and the engineers, geologists and finance people who were going to work on the case. John Marchmont and Curtis Lefain who was co-chairman of the board with Marchmont, an elder statesman of the company, were in the forward cabin.

  Sophie was to handle the Australian end of public relations, working with Martin Thorpe in New York. She had chosen Sean Donnelly to assist with press releases and contacts with the news media. It was a valuable assignment for her and one in which she had already had some experience from her previous post in a PR company. She actually looked upon herself as Martin Thorpe’s helper. He had said she had a flair and could do the Australian end. He was a veteran. The challenge had helped her to put behind her the sudden death of her mother during a minor operation.

  Marchmont placed a lo
t of weight on good PR and Thorpe had pointed out to her that an important part of the case was going to be fought in the newspapers, on TV and in lobbying state and federal politicians. Marchmont wasn’t the kind of person who would give her the job merely because he liked her, at least not this kind of job. He too apparently believed that she was skilled. She wasn’t quite so confident, but never showed it. She had scraped through her liberal arts degree at New York State and regarded herself as an indifferent student, but she had taken to PR work.

  They made the flight in twenty-five hours via Hawaii without a stopover and collapsed for a day at the Regent Hotel. Sophie woke up the next morning to open the drapes of her room; she was greeted by a view of a deep blue harbour with ferry wakes chalked on it and the opera house on its promontory, like a prehistoric creature with an armoured shell basking by the water.

  She had her breakfast off a tray from room-service, cold fresh orange juice, fresh brewed Brazilian coffee and toast with honey. She looked through the Sydney Morning Herald, glancing out the window occasionally at the busy harbour, wishing she was free to take a ferry ride. In the finance pages of the newspaper there was an article about the dispute over the Mirabilly mine with the implication that the business reputations of Marchmont or Paul Travis, as the leader of the mining syndicate, were at stake. The heading was ‘Somebody Made a Big Mistake’. Then the telephone started to ring. First, it was Sean Donnelly with a pile of faxes and emails from New York. Then Curtis Lefain. Then Marchmont. This sequence ended for her in a page of scribbled notes and a long list of duties and promises.

  Sophie took the time for a shower and a quick look at herself in the mirror, in a pale blue linen summer suit and oatmeal court shoes. She picked up her heavy briefcase and let herself out of her room in good time. The party were to start a meeting in the hotel with their lawyers at 9am.

  In the boardroom MCM had hired at the Regent, Sophie met Max Haldane the heavy, drawly Sydney lawyer to whom she had often spoken on the telephone. Haldane was acting for them on the boundary claim and he was reputedly a skilled operator and a man of wide influence in Sydney. The introductions to his large team were hasty; they were now running a few minutes late. Marchmont’s advisers jostled for the best seats (close to him) around the wide oak table, as Marchmont took his, squarely across from Haldane. Sophie sat on one of the chairs along the wall with her notebook and pencil.