A bad rain in the middle of January wiped out 95 per cent of her seedlings. The river grew too hot. Not only that: the rain flooded the river with fresh water and this streamed into Moulting Lagoon. The oysters took a little sip to check if the salt water had returned, and when they discovered that it had not, closed up. Ten days on, and still only fresh water in the lagoon.
Alex could not have been more relieved, but for Merridy the rain that raised the level of his dam and replenished the aquifer beneath Dolphin Sands spelled catastrophe.
In normal conditions, the fresh water sat on top and the seawater ran in underneath. Even during a storm, the salt water would sneak in. This time, no such luck. The lagoon was not emptying. Metres of rain kept coming down, kept flowing from the mountains into the river. More water coming down the mountains than upriver, and no wind to stir it. And the oysters could not wait any longer, they had to feed. But hunger was not their sole concern.
“They think the end of the world’s come. They think this is their last chance to reproduce.”
Panicked, the oysters opened their shells and drank and tried to spawn. But to drink hot, fresh water was not a good combo.
Exhausted by their premature spawning, the oysters succumbed to bacteria in the hot water. They died at the speed of the bush fire that in the same year raced through Friendly Beaches. Merridy’s losses were huge.
She despaired about what to do with the surviving seedlings, only ten weeks old. As a last resort, she telephoned Jason, and they loaded the Zemmery Fidd. Merridy had little reason for optimism. She had taken it as Gospel that the species was not evolved enough to survive on pure salt water. That the Pacific oyster did not exist which grew all its life in the ocean. More or less everyone in the industry shared Gatenby’s belief: “If you’re stupid enough to grow your seedlings in the sea, they’ll die in a day.” As she dropped the seedlings overboard, she had the notion that she was burying them.
But out in Oyster Bay a miracle happened.
It gave her more intense pleasure even than to buy Alex a tractor. Fifteen months after the flood that all but destroyed her harvest, Merridy brought home a bucket containing two dozen live oysters. The first that she had cultivated from seed in Oyster Bay.
“I guess you could say they’re really pretty-looking,” passing one to Alex. “A lot more water flow. Not with mud and silt settling on them. I’m getting into feeling glad it happened.”
And watching her husband inspect the craggy, purple-white oyster that she had grown in the sea she was overcome by the certainty of her affection for him. They had come out of their tangle and the road stretched ahead; it was not the road they had started on, but she could see where it led and the knowledge no longer made her despondent.
Merridy’s decision to relocate her lanterns in the bay did more than safeguard the oyster farm: it guaranteed a demand for her produce that was unstoppable. Sure, the rough water rumbled the topmost trays. The oysters in those trays were smaller as a result, their shells more friable. She passed anxious days worrying in case the trade rejected them. On the contrary. The splitters in Melbourne found that they could shuck twice as many of Merridy’s thinner-shelled oysters. Around Christmas time, it was her sea-grown oysters that the restaurateurs in St Kilda savoured above their Tasmanian river cousins. Their salty ocean taste and sharpness of flavour and distinct colouring. Most important of all, the customers clamoured for Oblong Oysters–although this would take a while for Merridy to discover.
Dmitri, her new wholesaler in Melbourne, was a Greek of few words, and these reluctantly spoken during their fortnightly telephone conversations. Les Gatenby had recommended him as “a real straight-shooter”. They had yet to meet, but Dmitri had made a verbal agreement to take a pallet of 600 dozen a week.
On Monday afternoons, Merridy watched the shipment leave her shed in the East Coast Freight van–always with a tinge of sadness at the sight of the door rolling down on the pallet. The oysters were now out of her care, and she pictured their onward journey with the involved concern of any guardian. Van to Hobart. Into a container. Trucked to Devonport. Across on the Spirit and landing at 11.00 a.m. Wednesday in Melbourne fish market where Dmitri’s splitters waited.
She had no idea if her competitors bothered much about what happened to their produce once it left their sheds, but Merridy cared. Dmitri’s lack of feedback maddened her. “You’re a customer, Dmitri, but you’re not the final customer. What did you think of that shipment? Was it the right size? What are customers saying?”
“Beautiful oysters–and send me some more next week. Oh, and I like the hessian packaging.”
“That’s as far as he goes,” she raged to Alex. “When I send him crackerjack oysters and he goes, ‘Yeah, they’re all right, can you send me two extra pallets?’–that’s when I know they’re fantastic.”
One night–he must have been drinking–Dmitri telephoned, and this time verged on the loquacious. He talked about his health and daughter, and towards the end of his call invited Merridy to Melbourne to discuss a business proposition.
“I don’t have time to go to Melbourne, Dmitri. Let’s talk about it now.”
This was not Dmitri’s method. Always in their telephone conversations thereafter he was sure to raise the subject of a meeting–“One to one, no lawyers, just you-me”.
His persistence began to irritate. One evening, she declared: “I will never come back to Melbourne–not until you tell me what your customers think of my oysters.”
Silence. Then in his grave surly voice: “You ask what the customers say? They say your oysters are so good, you get a stiff neck when you eat them!”
At some point she would have to yield to Dmitri’s pleas and fly to Melbourne. For the moment, though, she was happy with their arrangement. Dmitri’s guarantee to buy a pallet and a half every week ensured that money flowed in on a regular basis, easing the pressure on Alex. But money was the least of Merridy’s pleasures. Every time she emptied out a lantern filled with her Pacific oysters, she felt like a pioneer in the early days of a new industry; and there was the pride she took in her boat.
Because the Zemmery Fidd had such a wide beam, she was safe in most weathers. This meant that Merridy was called out to help vessels in distress if the police launch in Bicheno could not reach them in time, or if the sea was too rough for the 18-foot coastguard boat in Swansea. When a high-speed rubber dinghy, on a joyride in Coles Bay, tipped off six people–and there were a few broken bones besides–Sergeant Finter had no sympathy. He chewed out the survivors: “You’d have drowned if it hadn’t been for Mrs Dove.”
FREYCINET COURT HOTEL. Talbot’s Newsletter would like to extend a warm welcome to Murray Went, the new proprietor. Two licensed bars and restaurant. Open for bookings. “We look forward to seeing you.”
That same summer they lost Flash. The restorative air had given the creature a new lease of life. The lifespan of a Border collie was generally no more than twelve years. Smelly, blind, lame, Flash was almost seventeen when Alex pressed the cold barrel of his Purdey to her trusting neck.
He and Merridy were left desolate. For six weeks, Alex could not bring himself even to begin looking for a replacement. But the farm needed a working dog and he used the occasion of Merridy’s birthday to give her a puppy that was part collie, part golden retriever. Rusty had a pedigree from Europe on both sides, said the woman at the Kennel Club–who added what an ass Jennifer was to have left a champion bitch on heat playing behind the clubhouse with Sally’s retriever. She pointed out Rusty’s extraordinary feet, built to run on sand, and remarked how sensible of Alex to choose this combination of breeds. “I have known this mixture before and they give endless pleasure to children.”
She did not have children, but at thirty-six Merridy had never felt so clear-headed, so precise in her thoughts and movements. Whereas before she had melted from life, now she strode towards it. She was confident that her stripe of grief had been removed. Perhaps removed messily as a gland is
removed. But removed.
Until one mild early morning when she was steering the Zemmery Fidd across the bay, the same uneventful and endless stretch of sea that her marriage had become, the realisation came to her that she was uncomplicatedly content. After so many years of fretfulness and frustration, her anxieties seemed resolved into the sea. At last, it suited her to be on this rim of the world. She no longer scanned the horizon for a phantom sail. She looked down into the sea. At her achievement. There might not be a God, but there was the sound of the waves, now hushed, now loud, galloping on through the day and night for ever.
PART III
Oyster Bay, 12–16 December 2004
CHAPTER ONE
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FRONT LINE. We have noticed with alarm the growing pilfering by young boys of goods in shops. Maybe names should be named. The editor will give thought to this matter. A.T.
No one forecast the storm. Not on Merridy’s radio nor in the Mercury. It came out of a day so calm and bright and blue that Ray Grogan had locked his office three hours early to go fishing.
It was such a rare afternoon that as soon as Albert Talbot observed Ray’s trailer approaching the ramp, he did what he had not done in a long while. He put down his binoculars, abandoned his customary position at the top-storey porthole and shuffled down the back staircase to watch at close quarters. Ray’s gleaming craft was the envy of Talbot’s proprietor and put the former coast-watcher in mind of the American patrol-boat that had dropped him ashore in New Britain. Even though it was his basic rule that any time you went down to the coast you struck trouble, there was also a tricky matter that he needed to broach with Ray, about his son Zac. Hired by Talbot’s for the holiday season, Merridy’s fourteen-year-old godson had been caught in the act of removing a wad of notes from the till.
In the event, Albert did not manage to speak to Ray, but he inched his way along the jetty in time to overhear the following conversation.
Ray stood, hands on the hips of his shorts, beside a white van, waiting for a man in a wetsuit to haul his speedboat out of the water.
“You all done for the day?” Ray called impatiently.
“That’s right,” said the diver, who had an oxygen cylinder strung from his shoulder and goggles pushed up over his head.
“A bit early in the season to be packing up, isn’t it?” and screwed up his eyes to read the make of the boat.
“Well, don’t take the blindest piece of notice of me, but there’s a gale up ahead, and one you won’t want to mess with, you mark my words.”
But Ray was more interested in the man’s boat. “What is she, actually?”
“A Cobalt runabout with a 260-horsepower Volvo inboard engine. Sometimes known as a Bow Rider because you can sit in front. Really, she’s a lake boat, although I do find she’s terrific for reefs.”
“But there are no reefs around here,” objected Ray.
The man stared at him with a strange frankness and replied in a tone of sacramental gravity: “There are reefs, old soul, everywhere.”
Ray looked up from the boat to the side of the van. THE LONG HAUL. The words reminded him of his marriage. “Where are you from?” puzzled, and tugged at the gold chain around his neck. “You’re clearly not from here or you’d still be out there.”
The man waved a yellow snorkel at Ray’s trailer. “Trust me, you should be keeping yours out, not putting her in.”
“Never! You blow-ins don’t know your arses from your elbows. If ever there was a perfect afternoon to go and drown a few worms this is it.”
“Then all I’m going to say to you, old soul, is slacken your guy ropes.”
When Grogan’s boat Follow Me smashed into the jetty less than two hours later, everyone except Albert was taken by surprise. The old man watched the gusts of wind needling his window, packed with sea-spray and sand to obliterate his view, and mumbled to himself: “I wonder who that clever dick was? How did he know what no one else knew?”
The storm thundered in like a log-truck. It hit the beach late afternoon, the cold wind moaning as it passed through the telegraph wires, clattering off a loose sheet of tin from the shearing shed and popping out the wooden stays.
Its vindictiveness alarmed Merridy. The lagoon had thrown back a clear, pale sky when the van collected the oysters at five. She had left Jason to lock up and driven home to take a shower and afterwards sit in the kitchen, as she liked to do, reading the Mercury. She had changed into the soft green jersey that she had bought years before at a trekking shop in Hobart, though it felt small on her, and a pair of new trainers; her long, fine face lined against the no longer transparent afternoon light.
A breeze blew up from the beach, slamming the door, but she was accustomed to strong winds in December. She hardly noticed it filling out Alex’s shirts and trousers into bloated equivalents of himself that tossed and twisted against the greying clouds. Nor the new puppy that shivered in its basket.
She turned the pages. The Pope was dying–this time there really was no way back, the doctors were saying; the Navy had intercepted near Broome a second vessel filled with boat people, all claiming to be Afghans; a report on Tasmania’s increasing appeal for Japanese property speculators; and a photograph of a two-masted ship under full sail.
Something blundered against the fly-screen. She knew what it would be. Bogan moths with red eyes that liked the rain and banged against the windows and stuck to her when she tried to bat them away. Nor did she bother to look up when another door slammed. A good old southerly buster, that was all.
Soon the Crime Stoppers column absorbed her attention.
Sometime on Saturday, Elle Macpherson underwear was stolen from a garden in Lindisfarne. Her mind tiptoed after the thief to a house in North Hobart, snatching a neckwarmer, ski goggles and a centenary medal. And was emerging from a shed in Moonah tugging a Victa lawnmower when she heard a tremendous clatter.
This time Merridy reacted. She raced outside and saw that the rotary clothes-line was down, the tug of the wind so strong that Alex’s airborne trousers and shirts had uprooted the Hills Hoist’s concrete base. Her trainers crunched across the gravel to where her husband’s clothes lay in the grass. She gathered them up and was running back to the house, arms full and her mouth stuffed with pegs, when she glanced out over the deck. Strung along the south horizon a noose of cloud was drawing in. She looked at Schouten for a telltale flash, but there was none. Only the long low cloud advancing.
Still the wind pounded up the slope to a jingling of tin. It moved at great velocity, filled with grit and dust, quarrelling with all that it touched, frittering her flower beds and unclenching the green fists of the pine tree.
Only when she stepped back inside did Merridy hear the telephone ringing above the gale.
“Mrs Dove?” came the urgent voice. “Pete Finter here.”
Groggy from a bout of flu, Alex had not wanted to leave his bed, but the day was so exceptionally mild and sparkling–glisky, they would have called it in Cumbria, one of those bright borrowed days of early autumn–that he had taken advantage of the rain which had fallen in the night to plough a field on the east edge of Moulting Lagoon. For most of the afternoon he had sat warmly wrapped in the cabin of his tractor. The earth felt both squashy and hard, as if cardboard boxes were laid out underneath it and the land was a temporary thing.
Not until he stopped the tractor to swallow down a Paracetamol with a cup of Thermos tea did Alex appreciate how humid it had grown suddenly. How thick and hazy.
Wick wick wick. A large flock of swifts passed fast overhead. He could hear the wings and the clack clack of their beaks as they fed on a hatch of insects. He was too congested to dwell on the reason for their appearance. He sipped his over-stewed tea, watching them rake the sky against a lens-shaped cloud. Then he screwed the top back on his flask and returned to ploughing the field.
Protected by the pine break, Alex did not feel the force of the wind until he drove his tractor onto the road an hour later. But it wa
s not the wind that made him slam on the brakes.
Less than fifty yards away, right on the edge of David Macdonald’s property, a ghost shambled between the gums.
Alex stared into the bush. Heart chugging at the bright white figure that he saw there. The puzzle was the colour. Bill Molson confided to Alex’s father that he had seen a blue child hasten along the marshes where the black swans laid their eggs. Possibly he had. Not Alex, though sometimes he looked out for it on those evenings when he walked home beside the lagoon.
He slipped the tractor into neutral and applied the handbrake, mesmerised by the pristine colour. Even as he stepped down, he recalled a matron at his house in Sedbergh who had believed in the Radiant Boy, a luminous apparition that made its appearance with dire results. Now Alex found himself speculating, with all the rational instincts of a forty-three-year-old farmer educated at Oxford, whether the ghost might be one of the family of settlers who had drowned.
A pine cone dropped at his feet. Over the fence, the spirit moved behind a thick trunk of macrocarpa, and Alex saw it for what it was: a Friesian cow with a vertical white mark on its coat that it was easy to mistake for a human being.
He kicked the cone into the bush and climbed back onto his tractor and drove on. But the mark on the cow went with him; it remained silhouetted in his head like the flash when a strong light goes out, and it was still there when he turned into his drive.
Alex watched the house come nearer through the tractor’s windscreen. A grey cloud wrapping the ripple-iron roof. The fallen clothes-line. And through the window, Merridy, in oilskins, speaking in heated tones to someone, her hands winnowing the air as always when excited.
Secrets of the Sea Page 21
