Secrets of the Sea
Nicholas Shakespeare
To Anne Rood, for introducing me to Dolphin Sands, and in memory of her husband Trevor (1927–2004)
There is the land-locked valley and the river, The Western Tiers make distance an emotion, The gum trees roar in the gale, the poplars shiver At twilight, the church pines imitate an ocean.
A. D. HOPE
A home is like the sea.
BULGARIAN PROVERB
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
KAHLIL GIBRAN, THE PROPHET
Contents
Epigraph
Part I– Wellington Point, February–May 1988
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part II– Moulting Lagoon Farm, 1988–2004
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part III– Oyster Bay, 12–16 December 2004
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part IV– Moulting Lagoon Farm, 17–20 December 2004
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part V– Melbourne, April 2005; Moulting Lagoon Farm, April–May 2005
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Nicholas Shakespeare
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
Wellington Point, February–May 1988
CHAPTER ONE
THE SATURDAY ALEX MET Merridy he had driven to Wellington Point to look for ice-cream sticks in the school rubbish bins.
It was blowing hard when he came out of the playground and he could tell that it was about to rain. Across the narrow lane a movement caught his eye. Two girls helping each other over a high paling fence.
His heart sank.
He knew one of them–Tildy. She was younger than him, nineteen, with a tiny waist and cushiony buttocks and strong, almost manly shoulders. Her hair was dyed blonde, with a severe fringe. From certain angles she looked minx-like. On this afternoon, she wore a familiar tight-fitting green skirt.
It all rushed back–the warm honeysuckle smell of her young-woman’s bedroom, the disarray of her bathroom cabinet, his regret. He held tighter to his plastic bag.
She put her bare foot onto the other girl’s laced hands, and his attention jolted to the person preparing to lift her up. This one had thick dark hair cut short in a bob. Her lips shone with the same coral gloss as Tildy’s, but she looked different.
Before he could slip back the way he had come, Tildy noticed him.
“Hey, Alex…” rising up to sit on the fence.
She hauled herself onto the top of it and sat, her legs splayed like a wishbone, and looked down at him. A grin crept over her face, which under her make-up Alex knew to be freckled.
In the light drizzle that had begun to fall, Alex stood where he was, mortified. Feverish, congested, filthy, this is not how he would have chosen to be seen by anyone. He had spent the morning jetting the sheep for fly, and his coat and jeans were spattered with Pyrethrum.
“Hi, Tildy,” in a voice hoarse with flu, and watched her squeeze a narrow foot into the shoe.
Because she was a “blow-in”, like himself, Tildy was not one of the girls with whom he had played catch-and-kiss in this lane behind the school. She had grown up in the north of Tasmania, before her father bought the Freycinet Court Hotel two years back. She worked in the canteen at the school.
“Where have you been, stranger?”
“I’ve been crook,” he said, concentrating on her foot, trying to keep the image of the little balls of pantyhose at bay, but they were there forever, tangled up with the skin-coloured bra, the Kleenex smudged with lipstick.
She gave him another chance: “Were you coming to see me?”
His joints ached. Even his knuckles hurt as he stifled a cough with the back of his hand. “There was something I needed to get from the school,” and raised his head.
She nodded at his plastic bag. “Not stealing my tucker, were you?”
“Of course not.”
“What’s in your bag, Alex?”
“Just sticks.”
“Sticks?”
“Yeah, ice-cream sticks.”
“What in heaven’s name for?”
The other girl walked a pace or two away.
Alex stepped onto the grass where she had stood. “Listen, Tildy,” in a low voice, at once ashamed and contrite. “I’m sorry I haven’t rung you.”
Tildy flexed her foot, studied the drizzle drops accumulating on the toe of her shoe.
Bedridden, with a streaming cold of the sort that he had learned to catch when he was at school in England, Alex had been able to blot out the memory of their evening together, but now it returned in a cloud of heavy pollen.
“I mean it,” he said, and coughed again. “I’m really sorry. I couldn’t get out of bed for three days, and there were things I had to do on the farm.”
She drummed her heel against the side of the fence. “So you weren’t coming to see me?”
He shook his head unhappily. “Tildy, I’m sorry.”
She looked at his pale face and the plastic bag he was hugging to his chest, and looked away.
On a rotary clothes-line over the fence, a damp shirt dipped in the wind. Her friend waited. Whom Tildy now remembered.
“Get your bum over here, Merridy. Meet this great guy,” and to him: “Alex, this is Merridy. We grew up together.” Then, possibly to boost her appeal: “She’s at uni in Melbourne.”
Still, the girl did not turn, but crouched as though she were pulling something from the ground. “Perhaps Ray will get the wrong idea,” she said over her shoulder. “Maybe you ought to go on your own.”
Her voice was almost a sigh, a coming to the surface of someone who was no longer a childhood friend doing something that children did.
It came to Alex where he had seen her. Pushing a wheelchair with a sick-looking man in it, and walking two steps behind had been a gaunt, middle-aged woman, probably her mother. They were making their solemn procession up the main street.
Despite his fever he could still visibly see Mrs Grogan’s expression as she backed out of the chemist’s with her poodle in her arms, talking to someone, and tripped into the lap of the invalid.
Tildy glanced sharply down. “I told you, I’m not invited. Hey, Alex, give her a leg-up.”
The young woman stood and t
urned.
About white-throated needletail swifts, his father had told him something that Alex had never forgotten: They spend a third of their life in the air before they nest. In the days and weeks ahead, Alex wondered if this did not define his own trajectory, feeding and sleeping on the wing, and alighting on solid earth on the evening he caught sight of Merridy standing against Ray Grogan’s fence. For a long while afterwards he would cleave to the idea that his life, halted at the age of eleven by the accident, began humming again in that moment.
Rain making grey the washing. Tildy in her tight skirt manoeuvring her legs to the far side of the high fence. And the sea of sadness within the face that looked at him, and made Alex in that moment feel tall and alone and–in another remembered phrase of his father’s–more useless than a second toe.
Her face grew simpler. “Hello, Alex.”
Their glances touched, and now she was assessing him through blue eyes wide apart.
The way they stared. It was how wayward people recognised one another. Whereas on Tildy her lip gloss was part of a riot of colour which harked back to a period of adolescence that Alex would rather forget, this girl’s lips had the tinge of the orange lichen on the rock where he went to sit and watch the sea. He turned his eyes from her with huge reluctance, but not for long. He looked up at Tildy, her blonde hair, her gloss, and back to the girl’s lips.
Her gaze swam into his and tickled through him and fluttered down.
“Hi, Merridy,” he said, and his voice had an unfamiliar note.
She smiled, her expression enigmatic. Already her eyes were pulling away. They did not seek his approval or understanding. She was waiting for someone and it was not him.
“Help her up, Alex,” came a tetchy voice from the sky.
The smoke of barbecuing tuna mingled with the aroma of rotting seaweed and the sound of male voices.
“C’mon.”
“Right,” and cradled his fingers as he had seen Merridy do.
Merridy hesitated. Then slipped off her shoe.
He held his breath, looking away from her knees.
She bent her tanned leg, and rested her rough-textured, rather muddy heel in his knitted palms.
He left them, two girls perched on Ray Grogan’s fence. Only when he turned into the main street did it occur to him to wonder why on earth they wanted to be up there.
A minute later Alex climbed into his ute and sat behind the wheel, looking through streaks of rain at the end of the road to the sea and–at the end of the sea–the deep blue line of the horizon. He could still feel the imprint of her heel.
CHAPTER TWO
AT A SMALL, ROUND window–a porthole, really–high above Talbot’s store, two eyes observed Alex through a pair of long brass Zeiss binoculars. The brass still had vestiges of camouflage paint on it.
The general store was Wellington Point’s largest building as well as the town’s main employer, a fortress of brown brick and bluestone that commanded the north end of the street and the jetty. Its proprietor was Albert Talbot, who since his return half a century before from New Guinea, where he had spent nineteen months as a coast-watcher, tracking enemy troop movements day and night from the hills above Blanche Bay, was known to venture downstairs only occasionally, most often for funerals. Otherwise, he sat at the fourth-storey porthole in his eyrie, a tartan blanket across his knees and his mournful eyes presiding over the cricket pitch and golf course, over the waters of the bay beyond, even keeping half an eye on the bowling green.
Mr Talbot was patient for one so spare and strict. From force of habit he made notes of the vessels that arrived at the jetty, of the young men growing up, the girls coming of age. He had no children or wife himself. The few people he regularly spoke to were his manager (who would bring him the gossip and the rumbles); and less frequently his shop-girls, whom he allowed to enjoy the run of the ground floor, but would never invite into his private quarters. Lacking a family, he tended to regard those who shopped at his store as his dependents.
At a desk in what also served as a bedroom, he had a huge skylight above the bed, and watched over by the stars he compiled his weekly Newsletter, typing out each word letter by letter–as in the months when he had to send messages over his dry-cell radio set, ten words per minute in Morse code. Talbot’s Newsletter was distributed free at the tills.
But mainly he looked out at the street–it reminded him of the old coast road through the plantations–and the townspeople, who in certain respects differed not one jot from the light-skinned Kukakuka headhunters, Pygmy tribes and cannibals amongst whom Mr Talbot had once lived.
There was one road into Wellington Point and one road out. On warm days, it smelled of blueberry muffin and chemist’s scent and tractor exhaust. To the west a spine of hills stretched inland, coated in dense Crown forest: an avalanche of bluegums, wattle and sassafras that tumbled down the slopes and drew up at the outlying farms. On the east side lay Oyster Bay and the long rocky arm of the Freycinet Peninsula–a ridge of glittering quartzite that had risen from the ocean bed in the Permian era.
“Just how long ago is that, Alex?” Tildy had asked.
“About two hundred and ninety million years.”
Wellington Point was one of the smaller towns on Tasmania’s southern east coast and belonged to Australia’s oldest rural municipality. That it should have come by a reputation as a retirement village was a source of irritation to those like Mr Talbot who remembered when it was a thriving community the same size as Swansea, across the bay. Now the place was virtually a backwater. In tourist promotions of the island, Wellington Point (pop. 327) was routinely omitted from the map while Swansea was unfailingly labelled “the jewel of the East Coast”. In Swansea, they looked upon Wellington Point in the same way as mainland Australia looked on Tasmania. Which is to say, they affected not to notice it.
Like its more successful neighbour over the bay, the township of Wellington Point was a promontory of farmers, pensioners and convalescents drawn here–as was Tildy’s mother, now dead–by the absence of winter fog and a high daily average sunshine. Fishermen came for the bream and honeymooners for the view of Oyster Bay, which had once been compared to the Bay of Naples. Among the honeymooners whom Mr Talbot had–years ago now–watched get of their white Ford Zephyr, still hung about with paper streamers, were Alex’s parents, Basil and Marjorie Dove.
Basil Dove had had a great-grandfather who fought under Wellington in the Peninsular Wars. This thread of a connection to the peninsula here may have clinched it for Basil in his decision to strike out with his new bride for the east coast on the morning after their marriage in Hobart. In a hotel lounge in Wellington Point, he would learn from a retired English journalist how veterans of the Napoleonic wars had settled this promontory, which was named by a Captain Greer who had survived the whole campaign in the Peninsula and even fought at Waterloo, and who organised his convicts to axe down the thickets of bluegums and native cherry that grew to the water’s edge. Whether it was Basil Dove’s grey eyes that he boasted could see “for ivver”, like his fellow Cumbrian John Peel, or his romantic spirit, Alex’s father was instantly able to picture Greer, surrounded by fallen trees and recalling the battlefield where he had forfeited an ear; the dead bodies of the 88th, his regiment of foot, stretching in all directions. The promontory was now a home to the Greer Golf Club.
The site cleared by Greer and its panorama were spectacularly lovely. The sun rose between the Hazards, sparkling across the bay onto Talbot’s on clear days, and, at the south end, onto the Freycinet Court Hotel where Alex’s parents had spent their honeymoon: yellowish, mock-Tudor, with narrow windows and a courtyard.
In between, on blocks of identical size, were the primary school where Alex had been schooled until the age of eleven, a charity shop, a newsagent-cum-baker, two bed & breakfasts, the chemist’s, the Town Hall, the post office, a real-estate office, a nursing home–where Tildy’s mother had died eleven months ago now–a bowls club, a Uniting Church
and a Wesleyan chapel.
The chapel of Alex’s boyhood was today the Bethel Teahouse, owned by Welsh sisters Rhiannon and Myfanwy from Hay-on-Wye. It was, like Talbot’s, one of very few buildings in Wellington Point that did not sit with its back to the bay. There, from a counter at one of the Gothic-shaped windows, Alex could watch the jetty and listen to the log-trucks slapping on their brakes as they approached the school.
CHAPTER THREE
JAZZ SOCIAL
The Louisa Meredith Nursing Home invites you along to a night of entertainment with the well-known Barney Todman and his steel pedal guitar, playing jazz-style music from the Thirties through to the Eighties.
Come along and dance the night away or sing along or just come and listen to the music and have a fun night out with friends.
Where: The Town Hall
When: Saturday 27 February
Tickets: $17 (includes pre-dinner drink and smorgasbord dinner)
Music will start at 7.00 p.m. See you there.
It was another five days before Alex saw Merridy again. On Tuesday afternoon, he sat in the Bethel Teahouse, Darjeeling on counter, and flicked through Talbot’s Newsletter. It was late summer and Wellington Point was having a dance. He thought of who he might invite to the Jazz Social. The image of Tildy’s friend swam into his mind–the flash of a goldfish under a flat still surface–but Alex had no idea where she lived, and he could not very well ask Tildy for her address.
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