Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  His promise appeared to mollify Mrs Bowman. She drank her tea and the talk was of her plans, after the marriage ceremony and the sale of “Otranto”, to return to Ulverstone where she planned to take up again with her sister.

  The single other reference to Merridy was made as she was leaving. Her hand polished the air–she might have been cleaning a candlestick in church.

  “My daughter is slovenly, Mr Dove.”

  “I think she’s extremely beautiful.”

  She gave him a Pentecostal glance. “It’s frightening what we think is beautiful.”

  He opened the door of the Peugeot and she gathered up her black skirt and settled in.

  She sat there, gripping the wheel.

  “I would be grateful if you could make arrangements to collect Merridy’s Glory Box. Naturally, I will meet the costs of the wedding. And, Mr Dove–?” reaching for the door handle. “You should know that her father has left her a small legacy.”

  In the aisles of Talbot’s and at the counters and tables of the Bethel Teahouse they acclaimed the engagement as one of the excitements of the autumn. Agnes wrote a commemorative poem for Talbot’s Newsletter and the vicar in Swansea was in regular communication with Minister Twelvetrees over arrangements for the wedding service.

  They married in the third week of May in the red-roofed Uniting Church at the bottom of Radley Street where, not so long before, a small gathering of nurses and patients had buried her father. Minister Twelvetrees officiated and Mrs Bowman’s sister came down from Ulverstone. Alex turned to see Merridy on Keith Framley’s arm, and was conscious of everyone craning their necks to catch his own expression: Agnes, Jack Fysshe, Tom Pidd, Abbygail, Dr Musgrove, Sergeant Finter, Sister Surrage, Mrs Grogan, Debbie, Tildy.

  The rain stayed away, as did Ray-as-in-sunshine Grogan. Alex had not wanted to invite him. Merridy was relieved, but it worried her that Ray had still not proposed to her cousin, a prevarication that was the source of comment in the RSL and of a degree of panic in Tildy herself. Invited to be Merridy’s bridesmaid, she had caught the bouquet–“as if she was fielding at gully,” remarked Sergeant Finter afterwards at the reception in the Freycinet Court Hotel.

  It was dark when Alex drove Merridy home. He had to swerve twice to avoid dead animals. Sitting beside him, his wife of three hours looked into the passing trees and remarked that her mother had found it indecent the amount of roadkill that she had had to put up with in Wellington Point. Alex smiled. In his opinion, so much roadkill was proof of a nature in rude health.

  Not even at the reception had Mrs Bowman let up, tackling Merridy as she helped to carry the wedding gifts into the back of the ute. “Are you really not going back to uni? How are you going to keep your head alive?”

  “I. Will. Manage. Mum.”

  “Well, I’m going to give you as a wedding present Engineering World. Because your father would really want you to finish your degree. This is my way of saying: Please keep using your brain.”

  At the bottom of the drive Merridy reached over and switched off the headlights. The better to look at the night sky with its gunpowder of stars. At a slow walking pace, the ute crunched up the white gravel that seemed to glow as the vehicle approached the house.

  That night the couple made a pact that they would keep for the next sixteen years. The idea was Merridy’s. She kept looking at the door ajar on the wardrobe, blackboard-coloured on which to chalk the sum of her wishes. Some memory was hiding there. Like a face she knew but had forgotten from where.

  She leaped out of bed and stood before the wardrobe. “We must never shut this door,” in her most serious voice. “Ever.” She could make out the reflection of her hand, pointing.

  “I’m not certain that you canshut it.”

  “Well, from now on we always keep it open.”

  “Regardless of the consequences?” amused by her earnestness. It reminded him, with some reason, of a parlour game.

  “Regardless of the consequences.”

  Again they made love. Afterwards, she brushed his face with the palm of her hand.

  “You’re so precious to me,” he said huskily.

  His heart was so open, his longing so unsettling to her, that she had to close her eyes.

  He held her palm against his face. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

  “Anything?” It would come, hadn’t he promised? It would come.

  He was stroking the back of her hand. “In the whole wide world and I’ll tell you,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. “How did you get that penny into the bottle?”

  “No,” and tried to twist away, but she pinned him down.

  “You promised!” straddling him.

  He studied her face for a long second. “You’ll never tell?”

  “On my brother’s name.”

  “I’ll have to whisper it.”

  She raised the hair from her ear and lay forward on top of him, her cheek against his face. “Alex, I’m listening,” into the pillow.

  His fingers running up and down her naked spine–“Oh, yes,” she wriggled–Alex breathed into her ear the secret that his father had taught him.

  She said nothing.

  “Merridy?”

  Asleep. With the most tender expression.

  PART II

  Moulting Lagoon Farm, 1988–2004

  CHAPTER ONE

  REFURBISHMENT SALE. 5 piece older-style lounge suite $80. Brussels carpet $20. Westinghouse stove and Robin Hood canopy $30. Good condition. Contact: Merridy Dove, PO Box 311.

  For a great many months there was nothing wrong with their marriage.

  If she thought of herself on occasions like Alex’s penny, squeezed by a force beyond her comprehension into an impossibly tight and airless space, Merridy felt safe. She perceived in Alex the outline of an anchor. He had taken away her fear, and though what she felt for him was not love necessarily but comfort, she had trusted him when he had assured her that love–and with it passion–would come.

  In the meantime, she threw her energies into renovating the house.

  Four years since Alex reoccupied Moulting Lagoon Farm and he had done nothing in the way of decorating. The rooms cried out for her care. The house was cold, even in summer. There were no mirrors and frequently no electric light because of power cuts. In the bad light, it had become natural for Alex to ignore the ramshackle state of things.

  First, Merridy unpacked her Gory Box–or most of it. Then two cardboard boxes containing her father’s cook books and engineering manuals, plus his first editions of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley. All these she stacked in the spare bedroom.

  Next, she sorted out their wedding presents, and with Alex’s help distributed them through the house. She spread Tildy’s possum rug before the log fire and moved the Lear cockatoo into the living room, hanging it over the fireplace. She bought new mirrors and Electricare plug-in radiators. She removed her father-in-law’s bottles from the sock trays in the wardrobe and rearranged them on shelves in Alex’s workshop. By tactful degrees, she tidied up his bachelor’s detritus.

  “Guess how many cherry pips I threw away today.”

  “I can’t. Ten?”

  “Two hundred and forty-seven.”

  “You counted?”

  “It’s a habit.”

  “But your mother warned me how untidy you were.”

  “My mother specialises in warnings.”

  “She called you slovenly.”

  “Only around her.”

  Merridy had the corridor and bedrooms repainted in bright yellows and reds. She stencilled luminous stars on the ceiling of the spare room–for which she ordered a new bed from Hobart–and above the bookshelves that had doubled as his father’s drinks cabinet replaced Alex’s print of Merton College gardens with her pencil drawing, at the age of six, of a sixty-four-foot steel sieve, for which Alex made the frame.

  She installed her father’s radio in the kitchen that she refurbished from top
to bottom, and set about as one of her goals to learn to cook. In particular, she taught herself how to make pastas that her father might have appreciated. She looked with suspicion at the “Easy Asian” and “Fabulous French” recipes in the Women’s Weekly that Tildy lent her, and which called for Oxo cubes. Disregarding Alex’s indifference to food, she devoted herself to creating the ultimate red sauce, using fresh tomatoes from her garden that she boiled and peeled.

  In the garden, too, she stamped her mark. She did not like to think of other hands putting in the seeds and bulbs; she ripped out the wild daisies from the flower bed around the house and planted stylidium and native correa to attract the birds, and deep red peonies that she bought from a nursery near Hobart. As a last touch, she positioned two she-oaks in terracotta pots beside the kitchen entrance.

  So in fits and starts did Merridy create an environment–the first that she had known since childhood–where children and friends would be made welcome.

  Tildy came often. The cousins spoke regularly on the telephone in the days and weeks after Ray at last, at last proposed. Ray did not visit. Alex never said anything, either to Merridy or Tildy, about how Ray had damagingly neglected the farm, but he kept it in his mind.

  In the same way, Merridy never admitted to Alex about the times when she surprised herself thinking about the real-estate agent.

  On the first occasion, she was washing her hair in rainwater when there was a power cut. She lit a candle and was shocked to see in the new bathroom mirror just how long her hair had grown. She was trying to cut it herself when the lights flashed on again and she looked down and noticed her hairy legs. It was Ray’s moustache that she saw as she shaved them.

  And once as she stood planting seeds outside the living-room window in the pearl of winter, the pine trembling, she found herself playing Ray’s game and imagining how he might describe Moulting Lagoon Farm in the wholly improbable event of the property coming onto his books. The quiet private location. The classic, balconied home with leadlight windows that could be mistaken for a gamekeeper’s cottage in the English countryside. The exceptional views of the sea.

  A most welcoming entrance foyer leads to rooms of generous proportions with the character of yesteryear. The master bedroom has high raked ceilings with exposed beams and powder room off. Within easy access, and ideal for the growing family, are two further bedrooms, one at present in use as a workshop…

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MORE TO LEARN the valley, she walked for an hour, sometimes two, each day, or rode on the pony that Alex had given her. Clutching a discarded hickory rake-shaft for her stick, and with Flash at her side, she strolled out in the early morning or evening, with the breeze at its lowest. She took her bearings from the windmill. Whenever she was down on the beach she could see its blurring blades above the boobyalla line. The green vane that had her name on it.

  Merridy spent the best part of a fortnight exploring the property. She sat on Alex’s orange, lichen-covered rock and picked the marram grass seeds from her feet, picturing her husband at the age of eleven. She revisited the graveyard on the edge of Moulting Lagoon where Alex’s father had found the coin. And several times returned to the copse where Basil Dove’s neighbour had encountered the thylacine. The only fragrance she detected was eucalyptus.

  She discovered the trembling jetty from which Basil Dove had liked to swim. On the far side of the stream an eddy of air on an otherwise calm day caused a splash. She thought it might be a platypus in the reeds, but it furred the surface, then crossed the water and ruffled the grass on the near bank, coiling it with the force of a small cyclone. Or a spirit passing, she could not help wondering, as she watched the grass twisting up the bank, outside a disused shed and into the field. The grass greener than a mallard’s breast and on the hill an ochre shiver of grain.

  On her way back to the house, a black horse running wild in a field of yellow grass reminded her of how it was possible to feel.

  Away from people, she let her hair grow below her shoulders. She took to wearing the same jumpers and trousers. So relieved to be out of her mother’s oppressive clutches, leave aside Keith Framley’s uniform, that she stopped seeing herself–to a point where she almost forgot that she was female. It was enough to focus her attention on Alex and her project of turning a dilapidated Federation post office into a late twentieth-century home. A home fit for a young farmer and his family.

  When it was breezy, the sounds of the animals reached her in the house. They carried through the fresh-painted rooms with tremendous clarity, like the sounds of something lost. She heard the bellows of the herd, the lowings of the new bull and the clicking of horns. She had never lived close to animals. It took her a while to get used to them.

  Three months into her marriage a black swan pecked at Merridy’s hand, breaking the skin. She was feeding it corn on the edge of Moulting Lagoon and the swan arched its neck and struck, removing the hard yellow grain pinched from one of Alex’s cobs, and leaving a bruise on her palm the size and shape of a postage stamp, a purple one from somewhere foreign.

  A month later, she ran into the kitchen with a shower of white excrement on her hair and clothes. A wedge-tailed eagle had shat on her. She had disturbed it in the field below the sheep-race and the droppings on her shirt put Merridy in mind of the bottle in the restaurant where Alex had courted her. She stripped off and threw her shirt in the wash, but the stain did not come out and no amount of soap could remove it. Still, she refused to see it as a sign. Until the day when a cheerful plumber came from Swansea to fix a mixer tap that persisted in clogging with silt.

  He was under the sink so long that she asked if he knew a good solution to remove eagle shit from clothes.

  “I leave that to me wife, love. She’s got a remedy for every stain–and with the kids there’s a lot.”

  Packing his tools back into a bag, he remarked on the tidiness in the kitchen. “Obviously, you don’t have kids.”

  She coughed. The salt air often woke her with a dry throat. “No. I’ve only been married for four months.”

  “Wife got up the stick right away. Maybe before!” He closed his bag and looked at her. “Or don’t you want children? Some don’t.”

  Merridy was affected by the question. She saw by his expression that he felt sympathy for her, and yet she did not–until that moment–feel sorry for herself. His words upset her and soon afterwards she came off the pill and took notice of her cycles.

  Her mother never visited. Mrs Bowman’s sense of release following her husband’s death did not survive the winter. She used her daughter’s marriage as a staircase into a long cathedral of depression. She wrote on the first Sunday of the month, a single-sided letter containing meagre news and the hope that Merridy was enjoying Engineering World. On reflection, it had been a mistake to live with her sister; she was looking for a house to rent in Devonport; she had found one. And a PS in which she asked to be remembered to Mrs Grogan and sometimes to Alex. Nothing about grandchildren.

  TALBOT’S NEWSLETTER

  We have now been able to purchase from the contingency fund a 2nd hand collating machine. This machine should more than halve the time to put the Newsletter together. We hope to be able to increase the number of pages in the near future. Same conditions apply. No advertising detrimental to local employment. All submissions subject to strict size restrictions and editor’s discretion. A.T.

  In a moment of happy tension she called him Piers.

  They sat on the back deck facing the sea, between them a bottle of Coombend Riesling, empty. An autumn evening in April. They had been married almost a year.

  He reached for her hand. “Is that what you’d like to call him?”

  “Why not?”

  “What about Hector?”

  He felt the involuntary tug of her arm.

  “What if he’s a girl?” she said, and left her hand where it was.

  He contemplated the Hazards. South, towards Maria Island and the Antarctic, the dragon-colou
red sea went from green to scuffled blue. “Piera sounds nice. Piera Dove.”

  He was teasing, of course. Or was he? She squeezed his hand, but was intertwined, she felt, with a riddle. Not that she minded, or doubted that he was her answer. “Piers Dove. Piera Dove.” She said it lightly. Remembering a book of her father’s, of pale Italian frescoes. “I’ll settle for either.”

  He opened her fingers, stared at the mark, like a stigma on her palm. “Does that hurt still?”

  “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

  There was a flat croak. They watched the birds passing overhead, their eyes hooked to the rim. They looked as if they had been burned into the sky with a hot blade.

  So the sun fell in the menacing pink of Tildy’s eyeshadow and the lighthouse glowed earlier and earlier from the tip of Schouten and autumn became winter.

  LIONS CLUB OF WELLINGTON POINT have horse manure for sale by the trailer load. For orders and enquiries: phone J. Fysshe 63245668.

  Then there were mornings when the wind blew even the clouds away and the sky had the translucence of a membrane. From the kitchen, it stretched so thin that a tap of her hand could break it and the oceans it kept back would tumble her in angry torrents. On these days, walking the nine-mile beach with Flash, she felt that the whole sea was chasing her, flaring with a cold anger to protect its secrets.

  Not that she denied herself the vivid pleasure of picking up whatever the sea had dropped. Jellyfish in the shape of Tildy’s bras. Mutton-bird feathers pressed into the sand. Necklaces of kelp attached to a single stone that it thrilled her to hurl back at the waves.

  In Agnes’s Op-Shop, she bought a book on seashells and looked up those that she had collected. They might have been characters from her father’s unpublished stories: hairy arks, southern gapers, shining wentletraps, flaming dog cockles, exotic boring venerids. There were also mud-oyster shells from an Aboriginal midden, with round holes punctured into them by borer parasites through which she surveyed the horizon. Reciting to herself preposterously: He went to sea in a sieve.