Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Ten miles to civilisation,” he murmured.

  It was so quiet they could hear a pigeon drooling. Far away, the drilling of a speedboat grated on the sea.

  “What?” she was laughing again. “Wellington Point?”

  “No, the Hazards,” rallying.

  “I was going to say. You can’t even drink the water.”

  At her laugh, the prospect of early autumn tinged the distant mountains with a pink glowing promise. “You asked why I stayed,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  They walked along the lagoon towards the beach.

  On a slope overlooking the shore was a fenced-off area containing four gravestones with the grass growing over them. He waited for Merridy to read the inscriptions. The names of the family of settlers who had drowned in 1843.

  “What happened?”

  “They were a couple with two children. They’d been at sea eight months. This was the very last leg. The father took off his shirt to sunbathe when a wind came up and blew it into the lagoon. He dived in to retrieve it and got into difficulties and began to sink. His son stood up to jump in, but the convicts held him back–they thought they’d be charged with his murder. He was watching his father die when the wind capsized the boat. His mother and brother are also buried here, so I presume they saw it all, too. The father’s body was never found.”

  Alex pointed. “My father was tidying up the graves one day when the penny surfaced.”

  Merridy wanted to linger. She had questions to ask. But Alex was anxious to press on. He grabbed her hand and led the way to a low scalp of lichen-covered rock where, he said, he escaped to sit in the numb days following his parents’ car crash, watching the waves in their steady regiments charge in, wanting to be older.

  She tensed herself to sit, but he took her arm and guided her away through the emerald boobyalla until they came to a dune weed-choked with startling red flowers.

  “There,” he said.

  They stood on the sand.

  The earlier wind had chased a pack of clouds to the horizon so that there appeared no distinction between sky and water.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I was listening to the sea,” and rubbed her sandy heel against his leg.

  I am tired of living singly

  On this coast so wild and shingly.

  He stared back out at the bay. “Almost every day I see something, a cloud, a tree, a bird–and say to myself: Four years ago I wouldn’t have looked at that. And I can’t help thinking what a chump I was. I was so concerned, I’d forgotten how to look at land or sky or sea. When at last I did open my eyes that was a real moment. I’d just caught a bream, over there”–and waved in the direction of the river mouth–“but instead of the fish I saw hills and space and weather, and it made me want to look at it for a long time.”

  Alex wondered if he might regret the remark, or if she had ever met a more tedious man, but she touched his face.

  He held her hand. “See, you’re doing it again.”

  “Electricity,” she explained.

  “Electricity?”

  Her father had taught her to touch everything with the back of her hand. “Otherwise,” and flattened her palm on his wrist, “the hand contracts around the shock.” She gripped tight. “And never lets go.”

  She led him by the hand and they lay down in a clearing in the marram grass. The sun blazed in the absence of wind. She stretched out in the sunlight and felt no shame or shadow as he dusted the sand from her arms and her knees. The two boys she had kissed at uni had touched her with greedy hands and no tenderness. They did not tickle her spine like Alex or stare into her eye as though they wanted to rake the bottom of it, or promise an answer to the dark questions that she would like put to them.

  What she felt for the others with whom she had tried to envisage a future had leeched away until all she remembered was something synthetic and mildewed. Her feelings for Alex sprang from her intestines.

  The sand squeaked beneath them. The colours poured from him into the sky, the waves hissed out and somewhere in the parrot-feathered dusk a black swan honked its way across the water.

  When Alex got to his feet the sun was setting.

  In silence they picked their way back to the house. They were halfway across the lawn when she heard the scrape of claws on wire.

  “Can you drive me back? My parents will be worrying.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HER FATHER DIED ON Sunday. Merridy sat beside his wheelchair in the alcove, waiting for the next breath. He seemed to come up a long way to search for it. But there was nothing there. His mouth lay open on yellow teeth, his eyes in frozen gaze at the window, as if one of the bulldozers he had made for his son had wound down.

  The funeral service was at the Uniting Church. A handful of mourners filled three pews, including a latecomer who was whispered to have been Albert Talbot. Keith Framley, dressed in a suit too tight for him, read the eulogy in which he opined that “death is a turning off of the electric light before dawn”, and afterwards there was a wake at the bowls club where Debbie handed out lukewarm sausage rolls and hamburgers that tasted of roo.

  TWILIGHT BOWLS–It’s already started. Wednesday for 5.00 p.m. and only $3.00 to enter. So come along and have some fun.

  Not for another four days did Merridy visit Moulting Lagoon, driving from Wellington Point with her mother in Leonard’s 1968 green Peugeot. Mrs Bowman, not trusting their mission to her headstrong daughter, was adamant that she come too. She waited in the car, sitting upright and stiff in the passenger seat and glaring at the tree on the lawn, while Merridy sought out Alex.

  Merridy spotted him up a ladder against the shearers’ quarters, hammering nails into the shingles. The clouds had speckled over and a pair of wedge-tailed eagles scoured the poppies in a paddock behind.

  “Merridy!” He took hold of his pliers and hammer and clambered down the ladder two rungs at a time and ran to her.

  But her eye would not fit into his. Tomorrow, her mother was taking Merridy to Ulverstone to visit her aunt.

  He looked over her shoulder at the gaunt face peering at them from the parked car, the lank grey hair. “You’re back when?”

  “In a fortnight.”

  “That’s a very long time.”

  “No, Alex. To pack up. I’m going back to uni.” Obedience to Mrs Bowman’s wishes had given her an air of unreality. “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  Numbly, he absorbed the news. “Oh no, that’s a disappointment.”

  “Isn’t that the way it is? You meet. You say goodbye. I was always going back to Melbourne. You knew that.”

  With an injured laugh, he quoted Robert Louis Stevenson. “I think of Melbourne and I vomit.”

  “Well, it’s what my mother wants,” said her mouth in the same dutiful voice. “We’ve put the unit on the market.”

  He inspected his pliers, opening and closing them. It ought not to have surprised him. She had never concealed her intention to go back to university eventually. She had only stayed on to look after her father, and now she was free. “Isn’t there anything that would keep you?”

  “Like what?”

  He told her. He put his question to her and she felt the pins and needles returning to her heart.

  She did not answer. Looked away. A branch dipped on the Oyster Bay pine, releasing a fat black bird.

  From the car, a bark: “Merridy!”

  She made a strange sound. He thought she was laughing, but stepping closer he saw the tears streaming.

  She smiled through them. That enigmatic face. She said with all the conviction that she could muster: “No, Alex. I’m not good for you.”

  “Rubbish, Merridy, of course you are.”

  But the promise she had made to herself, it did not permit her to believe in what he offered. She went on in a beseeching voice: “What do you want? I bet it includes a quiet life.”

  “I suppose so, yes.” He was an implicit disciple of the seasons. The securi
ty of crops grown and harvested. He would like something durable.

  “Then you shouldn’t be with me.” And remembered Randal Twelvetrees: “You’re like your mother. You shouldn’t be with anyone–you’ll only destroy them.”

  Or maybe children would stabilise her.

  “Merridy!”

  “Listen, I have to go.”

  “But I love you,” his heart aching for her. He put everything else out of his mind. Her mother calling in a reproachful voice from the car. His leaking roof, his cattle and sheep, his barley and clover, his bottled ships. All his care on the young woman who stood before him and wiped her cheek.

  “How can I?” she said, miserable. “I’m not in love with you.”

  “It’ll come, you know, it’ll come.”

  She thought that he was trying to boost her up. She thought that she could easily extract herself as she had done in the past. She did not know what she thought.

  “Are you serious, Alex?”

  “Yes. I am deadly, deadly serious.”

  She looked at him and saw the faces of all the men she had repudiated.

  Meanwhile, the face that leaned from the car window had never been more contorted. “Merridy! Are. You. Coming?”

  His expression sabotaged her. She felt the gummy tentacles of his need. And hers.

  “Let me think about it. I’ll tell you when I get back.”

  FOR SALE: 1 pre-loved hospital bed and wheelchair. Enquiries to Sister Surrage at Louisa Meredith.

  In her father’s cocktail bar that night Tildy could not control her excitement. Someone had seen Ray Grogan in Sargison’s jeweller’s in Hobart. Buying a ring.

  “Is that good news, then?” asked Merridy. Her final evening behind this counter.

  “Just so long as it’s for me!” and splashed herself another incautious measure of Captain Morgan.

  “Silly,” putting on a smile. “Who else could it be for?”

  “Oh, Merridy, will you be my bridesmaid? I’ve never told you this, but I know how much I owe you.”

  “If you didn’t ask, I’d never speak to you again.”

  Tildy drew out a compact from her handbag. Her large eyes looked larger still as–mouth open–she applied her mascara. “By the way, how did Alex take the news?”

  On the other side of the counter, Merridy checked the level of the upturned rum bottle.

  Tildy glanced up. “Well? You did tell him you’re leaving, didn’t you? How did he take it?”

  Merridy gave a crimped smile. “He asked me to marry him.”

  “No!” Tildy snapped the compact shut, tucked it back in her bag and brought her stool forward. “Tell me, tell me, tell me. Of course, you’ve said yes.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She had never thought she would marry. Even if that was in her mind, she had not thought it through.

  “But you like him, you said.”

  “Like, yes. But I’m not in love with him. You mustn’t think that,” and put the bottle into the bin. Anyway, twenty was too young.

  “It will come, you know, it will come.”

  “Funny, that’s what Alex said,” quite pensive.

  “Then maybe he listened to me. It’s what I told him. It’s what I keep telling Ray,” and leaned over the counter. “Hey, are you sure that bottle was empty?”

  LADIES BIBLE STUDY. If you would like to know about Christianity and/or have fellowship with other ladies then you are invited to the Bethel Teahouse, Monday 6 p.m. Supper (finger food only). New members welcome.

  It was strange. Mrs Bowman had had a premonition that Alex was about to propose.

  In Ulverstone, she had called on the minister at her old church in Hortle Place, the one to whose son she had been engaged when she met Leonard, and asked him about the advisability of her daughter marrying this Alex Dove boy. Minister Twelvetrees was a wise old man with a long narrow face so worn by the sins it had heard that he had come to resemble a tawny frogmouth. His son Randal had settled down eventually with a girl from Albany and they lived in the bush, more or less content. He studied the photograph that Mrs Bowman showed him, a formal portrait of Alex in Oxford after taking his degree, and replied in a voice that sounded as if it had just sipped communion wine, rich and sweet: “If Mr Dove holds out one hand, you should hold out two.”

  Merridy was grim-faced for much of the fortnight in Ulverstone. She had felt like a sorcerer’s apprentice, handing over to her mother the only photograph that she possessed of Alex. She repeated: “Everyone in Wellington Point speaks well of him, except Ray Grogan, and that’s a commendation in itself, God knows.”

  “Mind your tongue, girl.” Mrs Bowman gave a little sniff. “Woe unto thee when all men shall speak well of thee.”

  In Ulverstone, they stayed with Mrs Bowman’s younger sister. Doss had been stricken by polio when an epidemic swept through the state. After she became crippled, having been beautiful, her husband decided to disappear. She lived in a crescent lined with pear trees in what had once been a brothel, subsequently bought by a Mayor of Ulverstone. The house had black-stained wooden banisters; dark varnished doors that caught the dull overhead light–beamed through glass bowls from the 1950s; worn green carpets that reminded Merridy of the Louisa Meredith Nursing Home; and peeling grey wallpaper. It was cold at night. Unable to sleep, she combed her mother’s Bible for ammunition. The small print revived her father’s grumble: “You can find proof of anything you like in that book. You can prove that Edward Lear wrote Hamlet.”

  One morning beside her breakfast plate, Mrs Bowman discovered a card with handwriting on it.

  “What is this, Merridy?”

  “Just read, Mum.”

  She put on her warped glasses. “Cast thy cares upon Him for He careth for thee.”

  “Letty, will you have some of this?” interrupted her sister. Her false teeth shining like the two rows of encyclopaedias in her hall. She had bought them in an extravagant fit after her husband left her and was still paying for them.

  “Now, Doss, you know I never eat cream.”

  Her sister skimmed a wink across the table to Merridy: “Whatsoever is set before thee, eat, asking no questions, for conscience sake.”

  WELLINGTON POINT RSL & EX-SERVICEMEN’S CLUB Former intelligence officer (MI5 et alia) reveals “A Life of Intrigue”. In the Clubrooms on Friday 25th beginning at 7.30 p.m. Members are urged to attend.

  Ask the friendly staff about becoming a member. Tom Pidd (Hon. Sec.).

  The fortnight stretched away like fourteen years. Alex waxed the sand-scratched floors of the corridor and kitchen; he finished painting details on the deck and hull of his latest model boat, and to the side of the bridge glued a white life-ring, the size of a Polo mint, with the ship’s name, Otago; and chores had accumulated in the garden. On the morning that Merridy was due back from Ulverstone, he cleaned out the lime-tinted gunge of a wasps’ nest caught in the water tank after February’s heavy rain. A few wasps buzzed at the moist green overlap, spiralling on angry wings towards the mouth–which he had blocked off. Clots of soggy drones circulated the surface when he stirred. He netted them out and sprayed with mosquito repellent the pipe that he had taped up, and after a day the mass of them did not return, save for one straggler.

  All the time, the thought of Merridy shifted like a heatwave in distorting currents.

  He was looking forward to her return so much that he did not hear the car. That evening, a tap on the window as he sat in his workroom. Preoccupied with the ship that he had launched into its rum bottle.

  In the kitchen, he turned on the stove.

  She did not take off her coat. “What have you been doing?”

  “I was working on the Otago, mostly.”

  “Did you finish it?”

  He fetched the bottle and laid it on the dresser. Ever prone to expecting the worst, he did not look at her but gabbled.

  “This part of the hull is made from the original ship, a piece of timber offcut, would you believe it, from a sawhorse
that was still there.”

  She looked into the glass, a quiet, steady gaze. On deck, a cat sat on the penny and her kittens all in a circle.

  “If you want, I could tell you more about ships, as I did the other day…” But he was as nervous as she.

  “I dare say we’ll have time.”

  “You mean…” and his eyes brimmed over with pleasure above a six-inch grin.

  There was only one condition. Before giving her consent, Mrs Bowman insisted on viewing the house.

  MENOPAUSE INFORMATION SESSIONS. You are not alone. The Pit Stop tent will be erected outside the nursing home between Monday and Friday next week. If you are interested, please drop by to browse or contact Cheryl Surrage on 62578380.

  Merridy’s mother arrived at Moulting Lagoon Farm dressed in a blouse of hailstone black muslin that had the mysterious effect of making her look a good deal younger than her years. She had come on her own and walked alertly through the rooms, taking everything in. If she had been a man, thought Alex, she would have been a cavalry officer, straight-backed, with a mouth like a tight strap keeping her chin in place. But something in her relaxed to observe the God-fearing gene advertised in the frames along the corridor. Her hostile religious spirit placated by the sight of the samplers, she continued into the living room where Alex had set out tea.

  He produced his parents’ best china, but Mrs Bowman was not to be bowled over by Spode.

  “Mr Dove, I won’t beat around the bush. My daughter ought to be at university.”

  “I quite agree.”

  “You do not know her yet as I know her, but I am concerned how she will behave if her mind is not occupied.”

  “Maybe she could do a correspondence course? But do you mind if we get the farm up and running before that? I give you my commitment that then she can not only explore, but achieve.”