Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Merridy never forgot her mother’s face when she received the news, the distorted look in her left eye. She seemed to stare at her husband through centuries-old glass.

  For the next two days Mrs Bowman sat in a collapsible fisherman’s chair and levelled her deranged gaze at the hole in the earth. The round dark entrance became the focal point of her worst fears, her wildest hopes. Her son had gone exploring. He only had to hear her anguished shouts and he would crawl back. It was simply a matter of hours before his sand-streaked face would emerge into the sunlight, and she kept a damp flannel at the ready. But as the hours piled up all sorts of extravagant theories stalked through her head. She feared that her son had been murdered or eaten. The detective from Wynyard had a brother in New Zealand where a feral pig–“as big as the trunk of your car”–attacked lambs and turkeys. Or else he had been plucked from the cliff-top by a bright blue Boss-Woss. Or a giant squid hunting for orange roughy. Or the monster marsupial Wynyardia bassinia whose fossil had been discovered in these selfsame cliffs by none other than Professor Theodore Flynn. More recently, the remains of a gigantic mollusc had washed ashore in Stanley, a cephalopod with eight arms each the length of the Bowmans’ Holden and two tentacles forty feet long and covered with powerful suckers each larger than a man’s palm. The scene tormented her. Her young son on the cliff-top in his golden morning. A kraken rising from the deep. Its dreadful arms encircling him. His unheard shrieks. The monster with its flailing prey sinking with a gargle beneath the waves, leaving behind a few bubbles.

  An hour after the little boot was discovered, two policemen equipped with foot straps and waist harnesses, and holding spades and powerful torches, lowered themselves into the hole. A neighbour’s Jack Russell was sent down, but picked up no scent. A thorough search revealed no lair of any animal, no trace of any boy; no clothes, no bones. When the search was called off, there was nothing of him to bring home or to bury, save for a straw hat and a scuffed right-footed Blundstone, size two. There was no body.

  A month later, the entrance was blasted shut with dynamite and a stone left on the bank engraved with her brother’s name.

  Every unexplained death has its own peculiar horror. A reporter from the Burnie Advocate described the impact of the tragedy on the community: The sight witnessed in Wynyard when the news became known was pathetic in the extreme. Strong men wept, hands trembled, lips quivered. Voices had an involuntary tremor in them and faces were filled with the deepest expressions of hopelessness.

  The Advocate editorialised that the young boy had been murdered and held out hope that the killer would soon be found: Sooner or later the finger of Providence will point out him who has shed the blood of a fellow creature. But in the absence of a suspect, or, of course, a body, the newspaper refrained from pointing its own finger.

  Her father did all he could to protect Merridy from these speculations. He kept checking to see that she had something to do. She took to wearing her brother’s clothes–his trousers and T-shirt that were too big for her–and to sleeping in his bed. His friends had been her friends. She feared that she would never see them again, because why would they come around with her big brother gone? As far as she was concerned, he had followed the noise of the sea, the sucking seductive roar. But his sudden absence degraded the whole of her life, an acid of loss inside her that she could not expel. When she realised that he might not be coming back, half of her was no more.

  It was worse for Mrs Bowman.

  Merridy was seven before her mother looked directly at her.

  “You don’t get over something like that,” Merridy said. “The questions are always there. What happened to him? Who took him? A person, an animal? What did they do with him? Where are his bones? Or even–could he have survived? My mother still believes that he’s alive somewhere.”

  “What do you think happened?” asked Alex.

  Tears were running from her eyes. She had recoiled from thinking about her brother and had learned never to contrast her life then with her life as it was now; but in the recesses of the memories that she carried from childhood had grown a conviction. An idea gestating in a dark part of her that her brother would one day return, but it was not something she could actually say in words, only feel.

  “My father told me the Jumblies had taken him. There was no need to worry. He had gone with them on a great journey.”

  A fly buzzed into the room and flew out again.

  “You haven’t told me his name,” Alex said.

  She had not uttered it for many years. Out of a promise she had so far kept. She was full of ridiculous promises that she made to herself.

  She hung her head, prepared, for Alex, to commit the sacrilege.

  “Hector.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LOUISA MEREDITH NURSING HOME:

  Invites community members on Thursday March 17th to 10.30 a.m. morning tea.

  Guest speaker: TBA. Topic: “Strokes”.

  Phone 62578380 if transport is needed.

  Everyone welcome. So come along.

  On a blustery day in the middle of March, Merridy took Alex to “Otranto” and introduced him to her parents.

  To conceal her nervousness, Merridy ran across the room and hugged her mother from behind. Mrs Bowman, in a yellow crocus knit, returned her daughter’s greeting with a metronomic pat on the arm while with her right elbow she covered up a letter to her sister in Ulverstone.

  In the large hesitant words that she forced herself to write every week, she had revealed her concerns about Merridy. “I won’t deny it, Doss. I know that dread is a sign of duty, but sometimes I fear that the crown of all my ills is perched on her head.” This was the paragraph that her elbow hid.

  “Mum, I want you to meet Alex, who I have told you about,” looking at him over the hand-knitted shoulder and winking.

  “Alex,” repeated the sombre, lined face. The day before she had sat on her reading glasses and today peered out of a crushed frame. “I am grateful to you for making Merridy happy at this time. Our family has been spared its portion of happiness. I expect my daughter has said.”

  “She has, and I’m sorry.”

  She gave him a speculative look. “Are you a believer?”

  “Mum!”

  Alex glanced at Merridy. Her rueful expression.

  “Do not ask, do not learn,” Mrs Bowman reminded her.

  “Well…in a manner of speaking. You could say, I suppose…that I believe in your daughter.”

  Mrs Bowman seemed to regroup, decided not to press further. The webbed feet tightened about her eyes as if her dryness was painful to her. She rolled her gaze down his right arm. If she was not likely to see him in the same pew at the Uniting Church, he might at least make a useful partner in the triples.

  “I have been explaining you to Merridy’s father,” and nodded towards the window.

  He sat slumped in a wheelchair in the alcove. His skin the shade of a peeled apple going brown, his neck swollen by steroids. He had the posture of someone in pain. A power cut the night before had caused the pneumatic headrest on his bed to snap down.

  At Alex’s greeting, he gave a slight, wincing nod, his eyes chained redly to the setting sun, where his sieve was–or his wife’s God.

  Mrs Bowman looked from Alex to Merridy as if she could see through the contours of the doom that awaited them: “I was sharing my opinion that Merridy should go back to university. She has talents that cannot be sharpened in Wellington Point. Nor, perhaps, in Tasmania.”

  “Not now, Mum.”

  “Well, that’s what I was saying,” and to herself: You’re going to be ruined like I was. You’re going to go against your mother’s wishes and be ruined.

  Firmly locked at the end of her husband’s pneumatic bed was the Huon pine steamer trunk that Mrs Bowman had prepared for Merridy in the hope of a devout future son-in-law–and that she took care to transport with her everywhere against such an eventuality.

  The Glory Box was a Proudlock tra
dition. Into it every birthday, Mrs Bowman would pack an item to supplement Merridy’s idiosyncratic dowry: scalloped cotton pillowcases, lace tablecloths, bone-handled fish knives from Sheffield, a Bible and Prayer Book. Merridy called it her “Gory Box”. On receipt of its key on her eighteenth birthday, she had added her own stuff. Tucked at the bottom in a plastic bag were her childhood drawing of a sea-going sieve, three scrapbooks, a photograph of her brother and a bright orange feather of a bird of paradise from Papua that had been one of Hector’s cherished possessions. Plus a pornographic video that her partner from the dance class in Ulverstone had given her for safekeeping. She never wished to look at it and she never saw him again. But folded away in the linen sheets donated by her Aunt Doss, the presence of Saucy Sally Sees it Through took the edge off Merridy’s embarrassment, and allowed her to smile in agreement whenever her mother started to voice plans for her.

  Mrs Bowman had learned from her mistake in marrying Leonard. It was her unshakeable position that Merridy deserved a churchgoing mainlander with a salary, not a Pom farmer with the most peculiar hobby. Plus, worse–according to her enquiries–an agnostic.

  “Of course, you can see that he’s educated,” Mrs Grogan had remarked accusingly in the course of a conversation in the aisles of Talbot’s. “Though goodness knows what he does all day in that house by himself. I mean, anyone can see he’s no farmer. I won’t even begin to tell you what Jack Fysshe says.”

  The bowls champion was searching for washing powder, but where the soaps used to be an unsmiling member of Albert Talbot’s staff had stacked bread. “But getting back to what I was saying. I spoke to Ray and he doesn’t once remember seeing him in church.”

  “No one will ever speak the truth about human nature,” sighed Mrs Bowman.

  “Ah, here we are!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JUNIOR CRICKET TOURNAMENT

  Saturday March 19th. Time: 9.30 a.m.

  Players should be able to bowl, bat and be able to score.

  Trophy donated by H. Ford.

  Dress: cricket attire. Ball and drinks provided.

  On Saturday, Alex rode with Merridy over the farm.

  It had rained in the night. Puddles everywhere. As if the sky had scraped itself on the ground and left rags of blue and white between the gums. Cattle eating stubble off the barley stood with fresh pats on their sides and mosquitoes bounced in the air.

  Near the edge of the Crown forest on the top of Rossall Hill was a copse of four dark macrocarpa that in Alex’s judgment boasted the finest view of his property. He dismounted and took Merridy’s reins and tied them with his own to a branch.

  He dragged over a large fallen bough and they sat on it while Flash rolled on her back between the grazing horses.

  Merridy wrapped her arms about her knees and looked down over the clot of farm buildings to the sea. The landscape so different from Ulverstone and Zeehan. Her eyes had never seen anywhere more lovely. It was tremendous.

  “See that thicket of gums?” Alex indicated with his riding crop. “A tiger was seen there.”

  Alex was six when Bill Molson encountered a young female thylacine, not more than ten yards from him.

  “He heard a rustle, didn’t think much of it, and then this creature emerged. He knew what it was because it had twelve stripes across its back. They stood gawping at each other, and after a few seconds the tiger turned and loped off, leaving only its scent behind.”

  It was a late February afternoon and Bill never forgot the sour smell: “He said it stank worse than his septic tank.”

  She peered into the eucalypts. “Do you believe it still exists?”

  Alex picked up a pine needle. “It’s like believing in anything you can’t prove. It’s like believing in ghosts. Or God.”

  “My father is convinced the tiger is extinct,” and she imitated the voice that he had lost: “‘The last thylacine died in Beaumaris zoo in 1936. Since then there has been no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the species has survived. No scat, no hair, no roadkill—’” And stopped. “I’m sorry. What a tactless thing to say.”

  “Oddly enough, my father did believe in the tiger.” But then Basil Dove had believed in an awful lot of things.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BASIL DOVE WATCHED HIS olive trench coat–with a sausage roll in its pocket–jerk across the floor and out into the landing. A young cocker spaniel had come into his room in a northern hotel while he was packing. The dog belonged to a firm-bodied young woman in a thick red dress who was going downstairs to the bar. That was how he met his wife.

  In Cumbria, his family owned a broom and brush factory. On the death of his father the running of the business was assumed by his eldest brother. Basil decided to emigrate. He was a passionate young man who could romanticise every situation and prosper with it. He had come of age in a rain-drenched valley in a period of blackouts, whale meat, egg powder and petrol coupons. After two years of National Service, he hankered for warmth, space and light.

  He was making his way to Tilbury, to sail on the ten-pound scheme to Tasmania, when his coat with the crucial papers scurried from his room. The owner of the liver-and-white cocker was on her way home to Tewkesbury, where her parents dealt in antiques, after breaking off her engagement to an oboist in a Scottish radio orchestra. She was easy-going, but easily deceived and when she discovered that her affections were shared with at least two other female members of the orchestra she had become energetic and philosophical. At the hotel bar, she and Basil fell into conversation. They spoke frankly of their drooping circumstances. Marjorie wanted to make Basil laugh.

  Bleakly convinced that she was, at twenty-two, washed up, she had on an impulse–and to the horror of her parents–accepted the oboist’s offer of the puppy. She confessed to Basil that although she knew a certain amount about early English oak furniture and nineteenth-century paintings she had never before looked after a dog. Basil fed him the rest of his sausage roll, asked his name, and when informed that he did not have one, and was only three months old, suggested Tethera, in Cumbrian dialect the word for three, and advised her to have his tail docked. “He’ll wag it like that and scratch it and then he’ll go through brambles and the callus will fall off and he’ll be permanently flapping blood, and the sore will never heal.” He pointed down with the stem of his pipe: “The skin there is like the skin on your shins,” and hoisted his gaze up her leg. “It’s that thin.”

  Marjorie stared wide-eyed. She was persuaded.

  Basil had a sympathetic laugh and a fondness for board games. They played Scrabble into the night. Marjorie won.

  In the morning they exchanged addresses.

  “But why Tasmania?”

  He said: “I hear it’s a place where you can go away and bury yourself.”

  Marjorie laughed.

  Ten weeks later a letter arrived from Hobart with details of Basil’s journey on the Strathaird to Aden, Ceylon and Fremantle and then on a Port Line apple boat to Tasmania. He had been one of seventeen passengers on a ship taking out Leyland buses and Morris Oxfords–“There was a great palaver because the leather seats went mouldy in the hold”–and returning to England with fruit. He was full of the sight of a queue of trucks stretching from the wharf into Davey Street, all piled high with apples and pears. He had taken lodgings in Battery Point to plot his next move.

  Over the months ahead, Basil’s family in Cumbria learned of his intentions to become a fruit-farmer, a boatbuilder, a cattle-breeder. He might even open a bookshop or a coffee house where customers could play Scrabble all day. Or a museum devoted to ships in bottles.

  “That’s Basil,” said his older brother. “Full of brisk, emphatic plans that never materialise.”

  Only in his plans for Marjorie Fulmar did Basil succeed in realising his wishes. For eight months, the pair wrote weekly letters to one another, until one night the telephone rang in a cluttered hall outside Tewkesbury. A long-distance call from Hobart. By the time Marjorie put down the re
ceiver she was engaged.

  “What about Tethera?” her mother asked.

  “I’m not leaving him behind. Tethera introduced us.”

  Fourteen months after their first meeting, Basil Dove waved to his fiancée from the wharf in front of the Henry Jones jam factory. Then Tethera shot down the gangplank and all hell broke loose.

  “I see you didn’t take my advice,” Basil said, returning the cocker to Marjorie, after seeing the long, frantically wagging tail. That was before a terse official whisked the dog away. Another three months before they were able to collect Tethera from the kennels in Quarantine Bay. By then they were Mr and Mrs Dove.

  They had married in St David’s, and after spending their wedding night at Hadley’s Hotel drove out to the east coast. Basil still had no house. He had dithered since his arrival, enthusiastically inspecting properties and then rejecting them. In the end, he had needed Marjorie’s approval before he committed himself, as well as the small amount of capital that she brought with her.

  Within a month, they had completed the purchase on Moulting Lagoon Farm. He set about building a barn and bought his wife a docile piebald to ride along the beach, and for himself decked out a room where he could indulge in the passion that he had had since boyhood for crafting ships to fit into glass bottles.

  The couple envisaged a quality of life that had been denied them in a country ground down by six years of war and years of rationing.

  “But they didn’t transplant well,” Alex said. “My mother never worked–she haunted antique shops. Nor was my father cut-out to be a horny-handed son of toil. Fitting little bits of cedar into bottles was his pastime, that and reading. They soon realised farming wasn’t for them and yet they didn’t want to return to England. Instead of trying to address the problem they just floated along. Then my father started to go blind.”