by Rosalie Ham
‘You’ll look very special for Hadley,’ said Lilith, sarcastically. ‘You know, Aunt Margaret, Hadley asked her to marry him and we think she said no!’
‘Pipe down, Lilith,’ sang her mother. ‘There’s plenty of time yet.’
‘Well, it’s not as if the area is rich with suitors.’
Phoeba had an overwhelming desire to stab her little sister but instead she said simply, ‘Lilith’s jealous because I got a gift.’ She would deal with letting her mother down – and put a stop to the wedding cake – later.
‘Now listen carefully,’ said Aunt Margaret, ‘I have news.’ She threw two pamphlets onto the kitchen table; ‘I have found the perfect solution for my poverty. I will sell the house and move to an artists’ commune!’
Anticipating the reaction, Phoeba reached for her mother, who gulped her tea, her eyes watering as the hot fluid burned her throat. ‘A what?’
Lilith was frozen, her teacup poised. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘It’s a very reasonable set-up actually,’ continued Aunt Margaret. ‘You pay a deposit and the dividends are invested—’
‘In what?’ asked Phoeba, now slightly alarmed herself. Banks were crashing at the rate of one a week. People were desperately trying to offload huge wads of pound notes for gold. There were strikes in every city and droughts and floods all over the country.
Aunt Margaret flapped her arms defiantly as if she was beating off small enemies, ‘My favorite brother-in-law, Robert, can see to all that. There are dividends, from somewhere, and they pay for upkeep of the property!’ Her eyes were gleaming and she was getting into her stride. ‘I have to cook and—’
‘You have never cooked a thing in your life!’ cried Maude.
‘—and I can stay until I die, unless I go mad, of course, and go to an asylum.’
Apart from the possibility of an asylum, thought Phoeba, it was a brilliant idea. Her aunt would paint side by side with other artists at their easels under gum trees resting with bright pallets on their forearms. There would be bohemians sharing picnic lunches with lyrebirds wandering peacefully on a dilapidated mansion lawn.
‘Is it at Heidelberg?’ she asked.
‘Not the Impressionists,’ said her aunt as if she was saying Leprosy. ‘Realists and naturalists—’
‘Lord save you, Margaret!’ screamed Maude fanning her reddening face. ‘A naturalist camp is no place for a respectable woman!’
‘It is communal living, Maude. I will not be cavorting naked with nature,’ explained Aunt Margaret, soothingly. ‘The place is called Esperance and it’s in Fairfield, by the river!’
‘You have lost your senses,’ sniffed Lilith.
‘I am too old to go on starving, freezing in winter and frying in summer.’ She shoved a second scone into her mouth defiantly leaving flour on her moustache.
‘I think it’s a good idea,’ declared Phoeba.
Her mother regarded her as she would a traitor and snarled, ‘Yes, but you would Phoeba.’ She turned her attention to jam making.
Robert arrived and sat in the corner, his newspaper folded in his lap: CRAZED SUFFRAGETTES STORM WELFARE OFFICE. Aunt Margaret continued on about her potential new life. She had made an appointment to see the place the following Monday and Phoeba made a list of things she should make note of – amenities? And was there hot water? And what sort of food? And what if she decided she wanted to move out? Robert’s only contribution was to tell her not to sign anything.
Finally Maude plonked down at the kitchen table and declared, ‘I won’t sell my parents’ home so you can live like a … trull.’
‘Mother!’ gasped Phoeba.
‘How dare you!’ cried Aunt Margaret. ‘After all, I’m not the one in this family who traded herself for creature comforts.’
Robert calmly put on his pith helmet, gathered up the newspapers and went to his cellar.
‘It’s her life,’ said Phoeba. ‘She should be able to do as she pleases.’
‘You wouldn’t like it if we sold your home!’ cried her mother.
‘But,’ said Phoeba, ‘isn’t home here with us now?’
‘It isn’t right,’ replied Maude.
‘It might be right for Aunt Margaret,’ said Phoeba.
‘And anyway,’ said Margaret, ‘I can always burn the house down and sell the land. So you may as well sign.’
‘We’ll have nowhere to stay in Geelong,’ moaned Lilith.
‘Lilith Crupp!’ said Aunt Margaret, slapping the table, ‘the only time you ever stayed with me you told tales. You told your mother my house was a mess and that I only fed you sandwiches.’
‘It was neglect,’ said Maude.
‘I stuck the letter you wrote me to the front door as a warning to any other visitors.’
‘I suppose you’ll keep all the proceeds for yourself,’ said Lilith.
‘Mother already has a home, an income and a family,’ said Phoeba, and dropped a teaspoon of boiling liquid plums onto a saucer.
‘I don’t care about the money,’ wept Maude, ‘but it’s the only thing we have left of Mother and Dad.’
‘Rubbish, Maude, you have the crockery set, the furniture—’
‘Actually,’ said Maude, suddenly lucid, ‘I would like Mother’s sewing machine so that way the girls can at least sew clothes for themselves since no one will marry relatives of a naturalist.’
‘I hate sewing,’ mumbled Phoeba, tilting the saucer.
Lilith said that Aunt Margaret simply should have married.
‘And she could have married Archibald Treadery,’ added Maude, ‘but she rebuffed him, poor chap.’ She fanned her red throat furiously with a pamphlet.
‘I didn’t love him.’
‘Nonsense, he was a bank manager.’
‘You can have the shed when Phoeba gets married,’ offered Lilith.
‘I’d eat cab-horse stew before I’d move to this wilderness.’
‘You might have to,’ said Phoeba, watching the skin crinkle on the cooling dob of stewed plums. ‘The jam is cooked.’
Aunt Margaret drank too much of Robert’s wine at tea and at bedtime she stripped off, flung her clothes into the corner and crawled under the mosquito net in her drawers and chemise. She looked over at the book Phoeba was reading. ‘You won’t like the ending of that story.’
‘Why not?’
‘Bathsheba abandons her self-reliance and marries for love; that marriage ends badly so she takes on the worthy character – the reliable sturdy one – presumably to be content for ever after.’
‘Would you have married the bank manager if you’d loved him?’
‘Oh yes. If I’d even liked him – but he was truly awful. I’m perfectly happy unloved and free to do as I please.’
‘Providing you can afford it.’
Margaret sighed. ‘People assume there’s something wrong with spinsters, that we’re missing out. But how can you miss something you never had?’ She took a small, silver flask from her purse and drank, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and checking the net around her for mosquitoes. ‘In these modern times girls don’t have to marry,’ she said.
Aunt Margaret was right, Phoeba supposed, but Aunt Margaret’s freedom to do as she pleased depended on her being able to join the family at Mount Hope at the slightest excuse. Phoeba thought of Hadley’s expectant eyes, of Hadley rubbing his forehead when things looked complicated, uncertain … when someone said no.
‘Anyway,’ said Aunt Margaret, ‘Lilith will snare a husband, there’s nothing more certain. She’d sell her mother for sixpence if it meant she could have a new hat. Remember the dolly?’
Who could forget the dolly? Little Fanny, Aunt Margaret’s neighbour, who used to play with Lilith and Phoeba when they visited, was sent to the corner shop for milk one day. She never came back. Gypsies, they said, or blackfellas. But when Lilith heard Fanny had gone all she did was race next door to ask if she could have Fanny’s black doll.
‘She has her eye on Mariu
s Overton,’ said Phoeba, an image of the handsome manager at Overton, rather than its owner, flashing through her mind.
‘Marius Overton, my, my,’ said Margaret raising her flask. ‘I bet you sixpence she gets him.’
‘Either him or the new manager,’ said Phoeba. ‘What happened to your bank manager, Aunt?’
‘He died,’ said Margaret. ‘Diphtheria. If I didn’t die in childbirth I would have been a widow by now, possibly with a nice stipend.’
Wednesday, January 3, 1894
Phoeba rose extra early the next morning to enjoy the solitude while she could. She mixed her bread dough, rolled and kneaded it and then dropped it into tins and left the loaves to rise. She was turning her attention to the growling kettle when her father came walking down from the outcrop with his looking glass in his hand. In the kitchen, he cut a slice of bread and threw it onto the stove, then scraped dripping from the jug and spread it evenly on the warming bread, watching the flecked fat melt into the dough. He cleared his throat to speak: they never spoke in the mornings.
‘Now, Phoeba, what about this fiancé of yours? Of course, your mother and I want you to be happy—’
‘Good,’ she cut across him, ‘then I’ll do whatever is going to make me happiest.’ Robert said nothing and the subject was dropped. It was Wednesday, either Henrietta or Hadley would call in on their way from Overton with the hamper. Phoeba wondered if it would be Hadley.
‘I think I’ll take Spot for a ride today,’ she said. She wanted to see Henrietta but dreaded it at the same time. Did she know? Would they all still be friends?
‘Marius Overton is delivering the new horse at lunchtime,’ said Robert.
‘Marius Overton is coming here?’
‘Yes.’ He picked up his warm bread and dripping and said, ‘now don’t make a fuss,’ but Phoeba had gone and the wake of her fleeing nightie lifted the edges of the curtains and even shifted the three remaining strands of hair Robert scraped across his shiny forehead.
Phoeba knew what must happen. Marius Overton must stay for lunch. Phoeba burst into her mother’s room and prodded the mound under the cotton counterpane.
‘Mother, get up.’
Her mother didn’t move.
‘Marius Overton is on his way with a new horse.’
The counterpane rippled and Maude’s plump legs fell over the edge of the bed as her arm shot straight up in the air. ‘Hand me my corset.’
Beside her, Lilith rolled over and raised her tousled head. ‘I’ll need to borrow your blouse, Phoeba.’
‘You don’t need my blouse, Lilith. Just bat your lashes.’ And she headed in to her own room. ‘Upsy-daisy.’
‘You know I have not been blessed with a morning temperament,’ said Aunt Margaret, wriggling deeper into the mattress.
‘If you stopped anointing yourself with sherry you’d be blessed enough to paint sunrises. Now come Aunt, the squattocracy is visiting – the one Lilith’s got her eye on. We need to be at our best if we want to unload her.’ If she could just make that happen, thought Phoeba, the pressure would be off and life would be perfect.
Lilith ran into the room, grabbed Phoeba’s new blouse from the wardrobe and ran out calling, ‘The wands, Phoeba, put them on!’
Margaret pushed back the bed sheet. ‘I didn’t know Lilith could run.’
Robert milked the goat, left the bucket in the cool under the tank-stand, chopped some wood, liberated the chooks and then sat on the veranda with his newspaper and looking glass while the house rumbled with thrupping skirts, yelled instructions – ‘Phoeba. We cannot serve rabbit!’ – and doors snapping open and slamming.
He watched a group of swaggies jump down from the livestock trucks on the nine o’clocker and straggle up the lane towards him, and he nodded to the dusty men as they passed though his yard humping their swags. Shearers. They didn’t ask for bread or tea and they were neater than itinerant workers, but not as neat as the fallen city men, the depression victims, the dispossessed bankers and factory workers, the shopkeepers and merchants. At least they would eat a few rabbits.
Maude called, ready for her final armouring, and Robert took himself inside to the bedroom where she waited, her large, cotton bottom hovering in front of the mirror and her whalebone corset in place. He took the laces, Maude placed her forearm under her very long, round breasts, lifted them and positioned a curved horsehair bustpad underneath. ‘Right,’ she inhaled. Robert pulled, pulled again and then tied the laces firmly. His wife turned to him, her high cleavage forced up from the satin and bone contraption like pink porridge.
‘You must ask Marius Overton to stay for lunch,’ she said.
‘Must I? You only want to boast to old pigwidgeon Pearson.’ But he held her long, chocolate brown serge frock patiently while Maude dived under the hem and manoeuvred it down over her now firm form.
‘The ploughing match is on Saturday and the dance is coming up,’ she said, forcing her arms into the dress’s narrow forearms. ‘We don’t want wallflowers.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Robert, thinking of the available men in the district – dozens of farmers, at least sixty shearers and rouseabouts at Overton, not to mention stockmen and yardmen, swaggies and sundowners, boundary riders and city guests.
Maude dragged the last yards of gathered cloth down over her hips and twisted them about until they sat neatly where her waist had once been. She turned again and Robert adjusted his eyeglasses to button her frock at the back. But his fingers were too coarse to manage the small, cloth-covered buttons.
‘Get Phoeba to do this,’ he said at last. ‘I’m too old.’
She bustled out, a rustling cloud of brown ruches and tucks, calling back to him, ‘and clear out the dining room.’
Phoeba pulled her sister’s corset strings. Lilith’s face went red and the veins in her neck stood out. She leaned her torso sideways, reaching over her hip to her knee.
‘One more,’ she gasped.
‘Lilith, you’ll faint into your salad.’
‘One more!’
The one thing Phoeba knew was that the day would only go well for everyone if Lilith was happy – she pulled once more.
By eleven she had a roast cooling in the meat safe and the smell of her hot damper was taunting the itinerants all the way up on the outcrop. She took creamy goat’s cheese and a jar of blackberry jam from the cellar and went to raid the vegetable patch, where she came across Aunt Margaret propped against the mesh fence with sketchpad and pencil, studying a caterpillar on a lettuce leaf.
‘Are you coming to lunch?’ asked Phoeba, noting her aunt’s grubby skirt and fingers.
‘I’m progressing from landscapes,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m tackling nature.’
‘Well don’t let nature tackle my lettuces. Close the gate when you leave or we’ll be eating fat fricassee rabbit with no carrots for the pot.’
Everyone was ready for Marius Overton by noon. Hopefully, thought Phoeba unkindly, Aunt Margaret would forget.
He rode down from the outcrop an hour later than expected on a tall gold and brown Arab. It was a majestic, lively horse with a sweet, dished face and flared nostrils. Trailing it, pulling against its lead, was the new horse; a short, ordinary hack – grey, a gelding. In the dam paddock Spot lowered his ears and walked to the far fence were he stood, dejected, with his nose against a tree trunk.
Phoeba put the carrots onto the hottest part of the stove, tied a thin black ribbon around her trim clerical collar, removed her apron and shepherded her mother and Lilith – both resembling rainbow lorikeets – to the backyard where they gathered around the new horse. Robert patted the grey horse’s cheek: it swung its head away. He ran his hand down its shoulder to its thigh and hock, lifted a rear hoof. ‘Ah ha, something’s up.’
The horse wrenched its hoof free. Marius lifted it and dislodged a dirt clod with his penknife.
‘Hello,’ said Lilith in her sweetest voice, and swung her shoulders like a schoolgirl.
‘Hello,’ he
said, warmly. He was pretty, rather than handsome, Phoeba decided. His face was brown but not wind-worn; his smart white moleskins were clean, almost new, and his riding coat was black linen. He tipped his boater – a city hat – to Maude and to Phoeba. ‘Ladies.’
Lilith just stared at him, dumbstruck. Phoeba asked what the horse’s name was.
‘Centaur.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Lilith, full of wonder.
‘In Greek mythology, it’s a wild creature with the head, arms and torso of a man joined to the body of a horse,’ Marius explained, his gaze lingering on Lilith.
‘How clever,’ she said, and fluttered her eyelashes.
‘How are your sheep this year, Mr Overton?’ asked Maude in her most interested tone.
‘Call me Marius,’ he said, with another tip of his hat, ‘and my sheep are thin and in need of a haircut.’
Maude laughed a little too forcefully and Lilith nodded sombrely. ‘That’s because it’s been dry.’
‘My word it has,’ said Marius, nodding with approval of her understanding.
‘Which is very good for Dad’s grapes,’ Lilith responded, seizing the opportunity to sound knowledgeable herself. ‘Dad’s got a bottle of last year’s vintage especially for you to try.’
‘I have?’ Robert was confused.
‘His wine is marvellous,’ said Maude, who never drank it. ‘You must stay for lunch.’ She clasped her hands, her arms framing her large, lacy bosom and glared at Robert to support the invitation.
‘You can show him your vines, Dad,’ said Phoeba, helpfully.
Marius jumped at the chance. It would be nice to look around the place again, he said, as he’d hardly been there since his father sold it to the Crupps fourteen years ago and, he confessed, he was intrigued by the grapes.
‘Last year we had the dust storm, of course, ruined half the vines,’ Robert began, as he led the visitor away. ‘The year before there was an early frost and of course, the birds …’
