Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  As I begin to mop up, the phone rings sharply. It is not the doctor, from whom Aunt Nina is expecting a return call, but our mother, and Allegra keeps calling me to come and talk, but I can’t very well as I am wielding a mop and bucket and quietly bleeding.

  Allegra: You should see the lemon tree at Mountshannon, Mum. It’s chock-a-block with lemons. And I caught a chook and Granpa chopped its head off and it hopped!

  Granpa: She should never have married that man.

  Allegra: We’re having a lovely time. I can still gallop really well but Bel doesn’t want to go fast.

  Granpa: She should never have married that man.

  Now I’ve finished mopping up, so I go outside and put my feet in the gully trap and turn the tap on them.

  ‘Bel, what are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing, Neeny.’

  ‘You’re covered in blood!’

  ‘It was just a bottle. I thought I’d go and put it behind Uncle Garth’s knees, because it’s cool, you know, and good for sunstroke.’ Blood keeps coming out the little wounds; I squash them flat on the couch grass by the tap. More blood spreads up between my toes.

  ‘It isn’t serious,’ I say, looking up at her. ‘I’m sorry, Neeny.’

  She sighs, and brings me bandages. She sighs again as she binds my feet up.

  ‘You’d better go and lie down,’ she says.

  So now I’ve been lying down for at least an hour, and I’ve just about matched up my hundred and thirtieth inverted lyrebird from the paisley pattern of our wallpaper when the door opens and chucks a shadow over the spot. It’s Allegra. She says Granpa wants to go back to Mountshannon. She still has faded marks of make-up on her face.

  ‘But I don’t think you should come in that condition.’

  Ordinarily it would be a cause for joy, but because I can’t stop thinking about Uncle Garth unconscious on the bathroom floor I decide I’ll stick my cuts into my riding boots and come along all the same. ‘Someone’ll have to carry his dinner,’ I say.

  On the ride back to Mountshannon with Granpa’s dinner of leftover roast packed into a steamer to warm up for him at the other end, Allegra has been trying very hard to be merry about Christmas.

  ‘I love Christmas,’ she says. ‘I love it how Uncle Garth puts the lights up in the elms every year and how you can sit out on the lawn at night and it’s so cool and up above the coloured lights in the trees blinking on and off, you can count the stars in the black, black sky …’

  But Granpa just plods along sullenly on Countess, his stubborn, blunt-cut profile outlined against a fierce sky. He wears his cloth hat pulled down to the bridge of his nose and holds his head high, so you wonder how much he can see behind the little round pair of dark glasses.

  Granpa keeps a field of poppies on the go near Mountshannon. In spring they are red, but now we are rattling through the grey knobs on their spikes. Flies cluster in swarms on our backs and on the horses’ flanks: there is the smell of dust and horse, and the last of the moisture in the paddock grasses is being drawn up through the shaky call of sheep.

  What does Granpa think of, that every year he grows more bitter and bad-tempered?

  Dear old Dad, we fought our way out of the mountains in the end. The Jerries gave us a terrific battering. It was bitterly cold. We were split up, and we lost our gear and our way. We found ourselves wandering in a poppy field. I picked one and pressed it in my notebook. I was going to send it on to the girls, but I lost my whole kit. Your loving son …

  I don’t understand why we die. I can never unscramble it. As if at some puzzle in the dark I try, but pieces are missing, hidden away.

  At the top of the valley, Allegra’s pony, used to having its head, grew skittish and difficult to control. I took Countess’s leading rein from her and let her go on ahead.

  Granpa and I continued silently down the rocky path, sometimes feeling the stab of hot light on our backs between the trees. Our shadows were growing long and eerie. When we reached the house, Allegra was feeding the dogs, so they made little fuss when Granpa swung himself out of the saddle, steadying his descent on my shoulders. To me he was heavy, so heavy, I thought I would buckle under him.

  On the way back, the sun was still blazing angrily on the horizon, and we seemed to be galloping through a hell of light that robbed the land of its shapes and colours and dimension. Riding side by side for companionship, we barely spoke or altered pace until we reached the home paddock and reined the ponies back to a trot. We were silent as they searched out the oats from the creases in my fingers and Allegra lifted the sweaty saddles over the crossbeam in the stalls.

  My feet swelled up so much from the ride that Allegra had to help me take my boots off in the bedroom. There was blood on my socks and I had to ease them away from the bandages where they stuck. It’s hours now since Aunt Nina rang the doctor and she is sitting waiting for him in the lighted vestibule.

  Allegra takes out the playing cards for a quiet game of poker. We talk in whispers. Uncle Garth is still not conscious. There is no help. The hands drove off to Scunthorpe for their Christmas party during the afternoon.

  TWO

  The Connotations of Sausages

  FOR MANY YEARS, Clare existed in my mind as the glorious past devolved to the less than glorious present. It would be for Allegra and me to arrest the decline, even to restore, if we could, a past grandeur and a familial nobility. In better days, Granpa inherited Mountshannon from his father. It took in all of Clare and most of Coolang besides. Hot in summer and wet in winter, the country was suitable for either sheep or cattle.

  Granpa loved cattle and he hated sheep. No one knew cattle the way he did. He had what was called ‘an eye for a beast’. And an ear, too, it seems, because when his eyesight began to fail, twenty years before we were born, he was still asked for his opinion and taken to the saleyards where he listened to hearts, heard the rib vibrations set up by lowing and bellowing, and took note of hoof thud on dust and turf, its sonorousness and the propriety of its pace. He could tell if a cow had been hard-droved by whether her tread was sharp or dull. Yet he hadn’t run cattle at Clare since 1910, the year our mother was born.

  Sheep, said Granpa, had dull eyes and shiftless faces and no singing voices to speak of. A cow, on the other hand, bred, bore and provided – a versatile, comely beast. And it sang. He hoped he would die surrounded by cow song. In the days when he could see and there’d been cattle at Clare, he’d herded the home paddocks in the evenings, Countess’s predecessor standing quietly in the gate. There’s heaven above, and night by night/I look right through its gorgeous roof, he’d sing in his tuneful baritone till the cattle, mesmerised, swaying, lowing harmoniously in cathedral lungs, would plod-dance to their resting place.

  The Furlongers had always had sheep at Coolang. Furlonger men and hands whistled and spat and made their horses dash. It wasn’t Granpa’s style. He liked to gallop, but not around a herd. His herds moved as one beast, there was a heart to it, a head and a tail, a good man kept it that way. Country folk respected a good man. He had what they called ‘instinct’.

  But instinct didn’t make a rich man. By Granpa’s reckoning it should have; an instinctive cattle man ought to have been favoured over a sheep man who calculated. No Motte worth his salt – and Granpa loved his salt – ever calculated.

  When Granpa met Euphrosyne, she was governessing at a station owned by her sister, Mrs Tennyson Taylor, née Gilchrist. Euphrosyne Isabella Gilchrist was a younger scion in a family of fourteen. She was slender, brown-eyed and was wearing her hair close-cropped after suffering scarlet fever. She was not built for robust country life, yet Granpa saw in the shape of her the shape of sons and daughters, and in her movements the dance of a joyful life. Sturdy in soul if not in body, Euphrosyne came to Clare and began the business of providing Granpa with his children, Nina first, then Haydn, Hedley, Shaver, whose real name was Robert, and last of all, our mother, Stella.

  Until the time of Stella, the joyful life was actua
lly lived at Clare. For fifteen years after the marriage, there were between a dozen and twenty people on the staff. Euphrosyne was known as a hostess. She could play, she could sing, she knew a lot of poetry. For Granpa she was life’s adornment and its blessing. When heavy with Stella, however, she endured a disaster.

  It began on a hot morning in February with the arrival at a gallop of Tom Furlonger, the father of Garth and Tony. He had just time to tell the Mottes that Coolang was on fire; then the wind changed and Clare began to go up. From the house they could see the fire scalp the eastern hill.

  Clare homestead was three wings around a courtyard where the household, which in those days consisted of a cook, a housekeeper, a tutor, a governess, a manager, half-a-dozen maids and seven or eight hands, pushed furniture which had come Euphrosyne’s way from Edinburgh and Granpa’s way from County Clare, thinking to load the most valuable pieces ready for flight. But already it was too late. There was only time to run for the dam. Euphrosyne had the good sense to take with her her stallion and two mares, from which she bred remounts for the Indian Army.

  While the fire raged and the sky rained flaming coals, Euphrosyne, big with Stella, baled water over her children, huddled under heavy damask tablecloths ripped from the walnut table, and over her mares and the terrified plunging stallion, and over the cook and the praying governess and over the trembling maids, while half a paddock away the men battled till the eyebrows and lashes were singed from their faces and, ultimately, they had fought off the flames from the house.

  For those in the dam, there was squealing, grunting, roaring, neighing, shrieking, crackling, spitting, howling. There were heartbeats amid the sawing of maddened blowflies and the piteous shouts of men. There were cramp and smoke and the dam water growing hotter, and at one stage bizarre piano music, strident over the continuous splashing of water by a mother big with child whose prospects were being licked from earth by an infernal tongue.

  Pigs burnt in the stye. You could smell them. Cattle perished at the fence rails. Birds dropped stone dead from the sky and most of the great trees, clothed in history, were turned to ashen fists. The grand piano played itself to death in the courtyard as the strings broke under a rain of coals, but Clare was saved.

  And, miraculously, the valley of Mountshannon, thick with timber, was saved. Fire isn’t as inexorable as flood; it only devours where the dragon turns its head.

  Into this blighted world then came our mother, jolted into being two months early by catastrophe; she came at the nadir, but they called her Stella the Star.

  No one in the district knew how to handle fire. It had never happened before. Insurance claims were underestimated: there was stock, of course, fencing, equipment and a house lost on one place, but what of the losses afterwards? Brucellosis got into the herds, footrot into the flocks. And a great wind blew away valuable topsoil before the regeneration got under way.

  At first Granpa believed he could manage, but he soon felt that the place had stopped being right for cattle, he could not bear having to shoot the remnant of a burnt-out herd again. Half the hands would have to go, and if there couldn’t be hands, there couldn’t rightly be maids. The tutor was a luxury. For some time the only thing that kept the mortgagees from foreclosing was Euphrosyne’s stallion, an excellent Waler called Oberon, who commanded a top fee.

  The change in circumstances was hard on Euphrosyne. It meant her sons would never have the education she’d expected they’d have. She’d assumed they’d go to Edinburgh and Oxford as the men in her family had before them, but Haydn had to be content with two years at Melbourne Grammar and Hedley and Shaver had a year each at Sydney Grammar and Ballarat. Even then, these arrangements tied in with the presence of Motte and Gilchrist relations with contacts in these places, and there could be no thought of university. As for Aunt Nina, she was ‘finished off ’, rather late in the piece at nineteen, at an Anglican girls’ school in Brighton, where she went from a house full of Motte cousins, including the romantic Cousin Vere, who was of her age.

  At twenty-five Cousin Vere would take a trip to Hollywood, where she’d meet and marry a movie producer, but at nineteen, while Aunt Nina was ‘finishing off ’, she was dashing about Melbourne with a young man who made her momentarily famous by rolling his de Soto sports car, with her in it, on their way back to Brighton after the Flemington races. The introduction of traffic markings on the road meant little to well-to-do young men, who thought themselves above driving on one side. Markings were there for the riff-raff who really ought not to have afforded cars: at least, that was the opinion arrived at among Melbourne Mottes, who, for the next half century would be downing street lamps, neatening the corners of trams and ramming any other obstacles which were inconveniently situated between them and their destinations.

  Aunt Nina was also on board the ill-fated de Soto, and she was in the company of the supposed son of the Bishop of Capetown, name of Weightly Lisle.

  Weightly Lisle – naturally there aren’t any photographs. Our mother would rue his absence of chin, his mouse-brown hair and decided lack of shoulder, but how would she have known? She was a child at the time. She probably never saw him. When Aunt Nina, no doubt feeling the weight of family poverty as well as the weight of Weightly, eloped with him, Dad, wrote Haydn Motte to Cousin Vere, was a broken man. Vere felt she was to blame. Son of a bishop he might have been, but Weightly Lisle was also husband of a wife who ran tea rooms in Durban and father of her four children. The drama of Aunt Nina’s elopement had taken on Gothic proportions even before this was appreciated, however. Granpa and the three Motte sons, eighteen, sixteen and fourteen, undertook the long journey to Melbourne, dug the cad from the nuptial townhouse in Jolimont and publicly horsewhipped him for not having been man enough to ask for a lady’s hand. 1922. Granpa was fined £100.

  Aunt Nina returned, disgraced, to Clare, where our mother’s life was a toad in a kerosene tin, grass up to eye level and hat down to grass level – she was short. Euphrosyne was fifty-five and mortified. She resolved never to go out and show her face in public again. She, like her youngest child, became a hat on the move through herbage.

  In the midst of this scandal was Garth Furlonger, twenty-six years old, a qualified doctor and veteran of the Somme. Suspected of being alcoholic, but no one would say for certain. He’d lain about in a stupor after the Somme, but the stupor in which he’d latterly been lying about was attributed to Aunt Nina’s hasty actions, for he was known to love Aunt Nina; he’d loved her from childhood. The Mottes had thought it quite a joke. Until the fire, the Furlongers had been the people over the hill who ran sheep. Their saddles creaked and some of them talked through their noses. Anyway, as our mother put it, Garth Furlonger saw his opportunity, had his suit pressed and came and pressed his suit.

  In those days, when there were three Motte sons, no one dreamt of Clare ending up in the hands of Garth Furlonger. He took Aunt Nina to live in Adelaide and proceeded to be sacked from practices the length and breadth of North Terrace while Aunt Nina wrote impassioned letters in his defence and on his behalf, pleading war neurosis and pain from a bayonet wound in the chest. At the same time, poor Aunt Nina lost babies at the rate of one per breeding season. The Mottes, with true medical acumen, put the losses down to Garth’s drinking. It made the babies slippery.

  So the Mottes lost first ground, and then ground and babies, to the Furlongers quite steadily from the fire of 1910 on until ’42, when they lost three sons. At Clare the round-edged, Georgian drawers hid sharp things and all glass was a potential shattering. Soft though the footfall was on the heavy carpets, it bore the weight of misery.

  Coolang began by leasing pasturage, then each year another paddock, a dam, a short stretch of the water course. Granpa started to call the Furlongers ‘calculating people’ whenever their name was mentioned. He lived for the day when history would right itself, but history didn’t. Drought, begun in 1940, continued till 1945; from ’45 to ’51, there were shortages of labour; then migrants ca
me and there was no money for making farm machinery. Following that, there was inflation.

  By 1956 Uncle Garth was still alive, but unconscious in the shower recess at Clare where we had been forced to leave him after his fall. Nor did he die in Scunthorpe Hospital where he was taken by the Scunthorpe doctor at about half past nine on Christmas night, having become ill at approximately half past two in the afternoon. The journey from Scunthorpe to Clare was thirty minutes with an extravagant allowance for the opening and closing of gates.

  Dear Sir,

  Aunt Nina wrote to whomsoever might have seen fit to answer.

  I write concerning the recent ill health of my husband, Garth Llewellyn Furlonger, who suffered a stroke on 25th December, 1956. My husband became ill at 2.30 p.m. and I sought help from the Scunthorpe Hospital by phone before 3.00 p.m. Despite my repeated telephoning and several requests for an ambulance, it was not until 9.30 p.m. that Dr Stimson, the local medical officer, arrived to attend my husband, who had been unconscious all that time.

  I need not say that it does not take seven hours to travel fifteen miles, even on foot, and Dr Stimson came by car.

  An ambulance was required, necessitating a further wait of twenty minutes.

  I was a volunteer ambulance driver during the war in this district and a three and a half hour return journey was the longest I ever made in five years. Furthermore, whatever the day of the year, I always made sure I was contactable for emergencies.

  I was unable to bring my husband into Scunthorpe myself as he is a sizeable man whom I cannot lift, and on Christmas Day I was alone except for my two young nieces and my aged father. I tried to contact some of our hands, but was unable to, and my brother-in-law at Coolang was unavailable.