The prettiest oyster shells she brought home to her bedroom and laid out on a blue cloth on her Gory Box. She blocked her ears to the sound of the waves, like pebbles in a drum reminding her: There is no God there is no God there is no God.
DEEP-SEA DIVER GIVES LESSONS. Contact: J. S. Phone 62578583.
She was often alone. Once the kitchen-fitters and decorators had departed, fewer visitors came to the house. Despite her radio, she began to feel out of the eye of the town. It was not an uncomfortable feeling, not to begin with.
When the hay was on, Alex was up at six. Through the bedroom wall, she heard him in the kitchen eating his unvarying breakfast. Three pieces of toast: one Vegemite, one butter, one marmalade. Then the careful closing of the fly-screen and kitchen door and after a few minutes the noise of a machine starting up. She lay in bed, savouring the image of her husband cutting and binding the hay and leaving stooks in the paddocks in the shape of the hourglass with which her grandmother in Ulverstone used to time her husband’s eggs. When Alex was cutting hay, it was full on from November to January.
In the early morning, the sun pressed on the southward-facing slopes of Barn Hill. She liked to watch it from the bed, flattening the paddocks and gullies into a long spreading curve. The kangaroo grass that grew in thick clumps along the summit was yellower than custard. Her eyes hunted for the man who had left his shape in the sheets. Who would return for dinner at noon and sometimes not until sunset.
Because, as she quite soon learned to appreciate, Alex was forever occupied. Judging fairs. Buying and selling cattle. Planting and harvesting crops. In January, he dipped the sheep. In February, he drenched for flukey. In March, he sowed for barley. In the first week of April, he prepared his heifers for the autumn calf sale at Pawrenna, to which he brought along Merridy. In May, he sprayed for grubs. She could understand why he declined repeated invitations to become a councillor or a firey or go on a whale-stranding course. He had no time. There was only himself on the farm, and now Merridy–who took it upon herself to look after the horses, cleaning the tackle and boots. And though she suspected that the land had not yet worked itself into her husband’s bones, she knew that the management of it consumed him as exhaustively as it consumed every farmer on this coast. He was part of a network of landowners all with the same agent, an unprepossessing fellow with a toupee and false teeth who drove around to see each of his clients every three weeks on what Jack Fysshe drily referred to as the Suicide Run: to stop any of them committing suicide after one of their number a few years back threw himself down a well.
RAY GROGAN is proud to announce the opening of his new office at 7 Waterloo St. “I am always in need of rental properties for short and long lets. I have a long and proven history of providing landlords with good reliable tenants.”
What was left poking through the froth once her memory simmered away the first months at Moulting Lagoon Farm was less the deepening dread that she would never conceive, nor the moments when she thought with a pang of Melbourne and her university contemporaries, but the evenings, early on, when they made love on the living-room floor.
Alex lay underneath her, his sandy head on the thick possum rug. He had never seen the colour of firelight on a woman’s cheeks. He could not keep it from his smile. How she edified the place.
“What did you do today?” He loved to hear everything. Down to the most basic detail. He welcomed the upset that she brought to his routine. The sight of her tights on the clothes-line. Her finger stirring a red sauce; her inevitable frown when she licked it. Plus, in the days when she was renovating the house, the never-ending trail of plumbers and carpenters who had traipsed through the rooms under her direction, even if Alex took great care to conceal his anxiety when their bills arrived. He drew the money out of his fast-shrinking savings, refusing to let Merridy touch her father’s inheritance. It was an article of faith with him. Anyway, the farm remained on track to make a profit. They were in love. It would turn out fine.
“Let’s see,” rising and falling above him, “I made bread. I finished painting the laundry room. I spoke to Alice about getting some bleach. Oh yes, and started The Shadow Line…”
She edited out the two letters that she had written to friends in Melbourne, urging them to come and stay (they never did). Or the wistful feeling that she experienced whenever she looked into Alex’s study, or opened Engineering World, or read one of Alex’s books.
In the hard bright sun of those first months the possum rug stood out. She remembered his tongue on her eyelids, between her legs, and was almost persuaded. Love was not sober nor static. It was the supreme example of tenderness in motion. And Alex had taught her.
“You’ve taken a prune and made it a plum.” So she told him.
She kept busy. Thinking of the interaction of their bodies. Thinking of their child. She saw, they saw, a baby plucking daisies off her jersey and staring up at a terracotta ceiling spangled with yellowy green stars that twinkled in the darkness. The Christmas trees they would decorate with cut-outs of shiny paper. The toys they would wrap–water pistols, little red Wellington boots, black felt Tasmanian devils from a shop in Bicheno.
“We are going to have a baby.”
Tildy’s jaw dropped.
“No, no, I don’t mean I’m pregnant. Just that I’ve gone off the pill.”
But it did not come. It was so simple: they could make love, but no child.
Unlike Tildy who now had Zac.
“You will be a godmother, won’t you?” looking up from her hospital pillows, barely ten minutes after his birth.
“I’d be hurt if you hadn’t asked.”
“Here. Hold him, why don’t you?”
CHAPTER THREE
ONE MORNING, MERRIDY JOINED her husband at his dawn breakfast.
“You’re up early,” cheerfully.
“Alex,” clearing her throat. She tightened the cord of her dressing gown and sat down. “I’m going to Launceston for a test.”
“A Test? Are England playing?”
“To see if there’s something wrong, silly. Dr Musgrove has arranged it.”
Alex looked hurt. He was a fierce dog where the body was concerned and certainly not going to submit himself to inspections.
“Well?” he asked ten days later.
She held up the letter from the clinic in Canning Street. “They say nothing’s the matter. Not so far as they can tell.”
He looked away. “So maybe there isn’t.” And came and wrapped his arms around her waist, as if she was a mast that he would never let go. “We’ll just have to go on rooting like rabbits.”
Winter came and Alex exchanged his T-shirt for a dark brown jersey and the trench coat that Sarah had sent back.
He had not thought much about Sarah until in his second year of marriage a letter arrived to say that she was coming out to Australia with a group of teachers, and any chance of their seeing each other? Her schedule was tight. She doubted whether she could make it to Tasmania. Perhaps Alex could hop up to Sydney?
“What, like a kangaroo?” said Merridy, feeling a prickle of jealousy. “Has she looked at the map?”
“She was always hopeless about directions,” Alex said.
When he telephoned the number that Sarah had given, she had already left for Australia. They never did meet up.
Meanwhile, there was dribbly-eye in the roos. In June, barely a day went by when he did not press his gun to his shoulder and shoot a wallaby or rabbit. Over on Barn Hill, their neighbour’s sheep got into a paddock and spread lice into Alex’s flock. He decided to dip the lot, not that it made any difference. All his fleeces had a bit of discolouration that year. Wool prices were the lowest he could remember. He had shorn the ewes in May before lambing, but the market had fallen further by October, when he sheared the wethers. “We need another Cold War, that’s what we need,” grumbled the classer from Kempton, rubbing a fleece between two blunt oily fingers. The Cold War had been good for wool, the Korean War better still. Peac
e was an effing disaster.
Once again, children from the local school gathered in the shed to watch. They loved to be there on shearing day–“Getting in the way,” grizzled Pat, a stout Aboriginal woman from Flinders, who was very patronising to Merridy, who quite liked her.
The children stood gaping at all the noise and activity: Pat and two other shearers stooped over the sheep; the morose classer feeling the fleeces for strength and texture, eyeing the wool for colour; the wool-roller sorting out the fribs and skin pieces to one side, and the stained wool that he threw into a bin.
“It’s all done by feel and eyesight,” Alex explained, leading them over to the shearers. He was quite sweet on Pat.
Merridy cooked a big mutton roast for the shed-hands. She would look at them, who had never had to cook in their lives, and see the possum shit in their eyes.
The hurry of the shearers, their pace and physicality–Pat could sweep a sheep from the pen with one arm and on a good day shear 130 fleeces–never failed to impress Merridy, but nothing impressed her more than Alex’s natural ability to send children into excitement. In Wellington Point, all round town, there were kids who would walk up to him and say: “Good day, Mr Dove,” after spending a morning or afternoon at Moulting Lagoon Farm.
Not only the farm excited the children’s curiosity. Once, coming into the shed with a tray of lemonade, Merridy overheard Alex in conversation with two boys and a lanky girl who watched transfixed as he held down a shorn lamb for the taller of the boys to daub with an orange D.
“Oh, Mr Dove, what muscles!” the girl joked admiringly.
“Why don’t you have children?” piped up the boy with the marker, and Merridy recognised Rob, who had stood in the Bethel Teahouse.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m doing my best.”
“What does doing your best mean?” pressed the girl. “You’re obviously not doing it right.”
Alex looked up and caught Merridy’s eye. “Hi, love,” blushing, and released the lamb, which dashed its head against the central pine beam and then shot off, slipping and scratching along the wooden grating. “Here, let me take that.”
Wool prices were so low that year that Alex toyed with the idea of going organic and then rejected it. He would persevere. At the end of October, Cascade brewery renewed the contract for his barley.
WELLINGTON POINT MODEL YACHT CLUB.
All those who are interested in forming and joining are invited to attend the inaugural meeting to establish Where and When. 4.30 Tuesday 15th. Greer Street jetty.
Like Mrs Bowman, Ray never came to visit. But Tildy did. Bringing Zac and magazines with recipes.
“I must say, you’ve done a great job, Merridy,” tracing a finger over the new ceramic cooktop. “A great job. But don’t you find it dull up here?”
“Not enough moments,” borrowing Alex’s words. She bent over the pram. “How’s his sleep going?”
“I only have to turn over and he wakes.” Tildy scanned the novel that Merridy had left open on the dresser. “But who do you speak to? Apart from Alex.”
“Oh, the sea, the animals.” They had a cat now and some ducks. “Does he need another blanket?”
“No, he’s mad for the one you gave him. In fact, Ray’s got a mind to cut it in half in case he loses it.” The book reminded Tildy. “You know, I went to bed with him.”
“Who?” stroking Zac’s mottled arm.
“Your husband, sweetie. Who do you think?”
“Oh, Tildy.”
“There’s me shooting my big mouth off,” sighed Tildy, and wondered if she had been on the brink of uttering something profound.
But Merridy was amused. “You forget. You already told me.”
“Do you–still?”
“What?” looking up.
Tildy’s hair was no longer blonde, after she met a man in flippers who remarked of her dye that the anti-foul he painted on his boat contained less poison. And she was pregnant again. So fat that her arms came out at right angles.
“Like rabbits, you said.”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”
“He wasn’t a rabbit before,” and Tildy cackled before falling contemplative. “You must have made him one.”
Merridy turned back to Zac. Who had the preoccupied smile of a baby filling its nappy.
“I think a new Huggie’s in order.”
Tildy looked at her cousin without rancour. To think that Merridy anticipated Zac’s needs before she did. “There should be one under his pillow.”
“Zac just needs a little fuss,” said Merridy, changing him.
Tildy sighed. “You’re a much finer mother than I am. You connect better. He’s just like his father.”
Merridy felt her face turning hot. She was tugged away from the pram, like any dog from a smell. “And you, Tildy. What about Ray?”
The Grogans had married two months after them. Tildy had worn black boots under her dress with four-inch heels. “I could only find them high enough in black.” The Doves had given as their wedding present a pewter tray.
“Is he what you wanted?” persisted Merridy.
“Oh, and more.” Tildy’s eyes fell again on the book. “Hey, that reminds me. I need your help. What should I read? I was thinking of joining Agnes’s reading group.”
“I’ll ask Alex.”
“Would you? I want to branch out.”
“We’ll make a list. It’ll be fun.” It was what they did most evenings, read. They had built up a small library.
Tildy folded her arms. “I must say, I really would go mad up here on my own. But, of course, the way you two carry on you’ll soon have family responsibilities.”
“I know, I know,” and smoothed her stomach. She was not going to tell Tildy, but she would have her baby before long. She had missed her period and already she imagined the shape and growth in her uncorrected body.
She did not tell anyone, not even Alex. She bought a test at the chemist’s. It was negative. A week later she bought another test. In the slow days ahead she haunted the bathroom, her excitement intensifying. Her periods were usually very regular. Even so, she was conscious that she lacked Tildy’s wholesome peaceful expression.
Draggedy draggedy. Day after dragging day. Like her mother’s first steps across the room after her stroke.
One Tuesday, Alex came home late from Launceston to find her standing on the counter, scrubbing the top shelves of the dresser.
“What are you doing, love?”
“Alice never gets up here.”
Then the frosty morning, a fortnight after Tildy’s visit, when she detected the spotting. Next day her period started. Not a child after all, but a phantom. And felt her womb heavier than ever, a black, empty, bottle-shaped presence inside her.
The next meeting of the poetry group will be on Wednesday August 9th at 2.30 p.m. at Agnes Lettsom’s house. The subject is: “Sea”–a word to conjure with!
The end of another August and the boobyalla were covered with little yellow caterpillars of blossom. She collected pine needles to put on the path and lay down the silverweed and old copies of the Mercury as mulch, and kept the mulch away from her fruit trees so as not to rot them. She wrapped her apple trees against codlin moth. She sprinkled blood and bone around the roses. She started a herb garden down near the beach–pepperberries, lemon verbena, chives–where she also planted tomatoes, strawberries and rhubarb. Her fingers gloved in dirt, she kneeled on the earth and pressed each seed into the ground. And once or twice lifted her eyes to catch a blue-tongue lizard with a taste for strawberries watching her.
She looked for pleasure in predictability. The daisies–purple and white–that opened during the day and snapped shut in late afternoon. The spinach flopping in large green spades. Her flowers that grew around the house in the colours, it suddenly struck her, of Alex’s samplers: in reds, blues and yellows.
Merridy was happiest, though, in the garden that she had created behind the dunes. Nipping the flower stalks in the rhubar
b, she thought of the child that they would have. She pictured a boy somewhat like Alex and looked forward to the day when she would be leading him by the hand to inspect her herbs and vegetables. “Your great-grandmother, who was a bit of a battleaxe, used to say to me: ‘God gives a herb for every ill.’ This is hoarhound for coughs. That’s comfrey for bones and bruises. Over there that’s broccoli, the everlasting vegetable. High on the list for needing lots of poo.” So would she converse with him, and not only about plants. “That’s a huntsman spider. They get active before the rain. Take your attention off them and they go away. But they’re harmless, unlike a red-back. See under that pot? Never put your fingers in anywhere you can’t see.” She smiled to contemplate anyone she had known at uni overhearing these private conversations. They would conclude that country life had turned Merridy Bowman Dove quite potty.
And in the evening after they had eaten, she gave herself to Alex in firelight.
“Oh, and I polished your boots,” she reminded him one memorable night, opening his hand and pressing his palm against her stomach. Not because he needed to know, or cared even; but it was part of the fabric that wove them. A reason to listen to his plans for the next day.
“That’s good,” Alex said, looking up at her, serious all of a sudden. “Since I have to go to Hobart.”
Her immediate thought–the windmill was playing up again. The complexity of the female body was as mysterious as the guts of Alex’s windmill, and as liable to go wrong at any time. His journey, she imagined, was to fetch a spare part. “Can’t East Coast Freight deliver?”
“I’m going to take a test.”
She stared at him, the meaning of his words reaching her. And was impelled to bend down and squeeze his face so tight that he cried out.
Secrets of the Sea Page 16
