Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

  She could have swallowed him whole or in her turn been swallowed. He had become the brightness of sunlight, the soft shadows of dusk. He was everything.

  Dear God, she thought. She would never have believed she could love another human being as much as she loved him. Again and again he ran his hands over her, his big hands touching her with such delicacy that they set her nerves on fire. She gloried in his touch. She was a reed shaking in the wind. She clutched him to her, hard against him, hips stirring, while he continued to caress her, slowly, steadily.

  ‘You are driving me mad,’ she said.

  It was hard to speak at all, tongue tangled in her quickening breath. There were imperfections in their bodies, as in all bodies, but they were beautiful. They were alive and together and life was beauty.

  ‘Please…’ she said.

  She looked up at him, gathering him to her, surrendering to the sensations flowing through her. She sensed his power but was not intimidated. It was glorious. Growing, mounting, the moment not far off now…

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. Oh.’

  Later she heard herself cry out, the sound forced between her parted lips, and finally, and finally…

  A splendour of sunlight on the hillside, with the shadows slipping away below her, and there was joy and peace and a sense that at last she had reached the place that had been her destiny from the moment of her birth.

  Afterwards there were gentle tears, a sense of gratitude and peace, a bottomless pool drawing her down.

  1834–1850

  There were times when Richard thought he had always been frightened. He could not remember his mother but had always been aware of an emptiness in his life where she should have been. She had died when he was born. Father had said it was not Richard’s fault but he had known that it was; if it hadn’t been for him his mother would still be alive so of course it was his fault.

  Things had been all right as long as he’d had Father and Mama but now Father was dead. Richard had seen it happen, seen the horrible spear sticking in him, and knew it was a sight he would not forget.

  Worst of all, Mama had died too, not from a spear but from some terrible illness. She had been like a real mother. She had been kind and made him feel safe but she was not there any longer.

  Now there was only the man who never smiled. Who told him never to call him Uncle. Who had mean eyes and a mean mouth and was always nasty to him. Who had said more than once that Richard was not a real member of the family but someone taken in out of charity and that he would find himself out on the street if he didn’t do what he was told.

  The people who worked in the house were nasty to him too. Only Mrs McIntyre the cook was kind. Mrs McIntyre and her daughter Alice. Alice was the same age as he was; she was his friend. They did things together. They had adventures.

  They grew older, which was another adventure.

  Time passed.

  Alice hated Barnsley Tregellas because of the way he treated Richard.

  It was unfair; worse, it was cruel.

  He and William were half-brothers but William went to the best private school in Hobart Town while at the age of twelve Richard was packed off to sea aboard one of Barnsley’s whale ships.

  ‘Told me it was time I started earning my keep,’ Richard said.

  It wasn’t right but neither of them could do anything about it so to sea Richard went.

  Alice wanted to go to the harbour to see him off. She could see that Richard was scared but not too scared to tell her to keep away.

  ‘Don’t you want me to say goodbye to you?’

  ‘Of course I do. Only I heard him telling the captain that I was a mother’s boy. That I had to be toughened up. If they see you down there saying goodbye it’ll be like telling them he was right.’

  ‘I hate him,’ Alice said. ‘Hate him! Hate him!’

  He. Him.

  They could not bring themselves to say Barnsley Tregellas’s name.

  She understood what he was telling her. If they thought he was soft the crew would bully him worse than ever. So she said goodbye to him at the house as he left in his sea-going gear: pea jacket, heavy shirt and pants, boots that looked several sizes too big for him, a round hard hat clamped to his head.

  She could barely recognise him, face white, expression tight, hands like ice. Overnight he had become a stranger. She tried to say something, to wish him well, but found she could not utter a word.

  Under the brim of his hat his eyes said how frightened he was.

  Then he was gone and the next morning when she looked she saw that the whale ship had gone too.

  Alice missed him more than she would have thought possible. She walked around the house, aware of the spaces where Richard should have been and was not.

  She tried to imagine him in the depths of the Southern Ocean doing brave deeds, earning the respect and admiration of his shipmates, but knew it would never be like that. Richard was as he was, a hero in the way he faced things that he knew were impossible for him, but that was not the sort of heroism that the men aboard a whale ship were likely to understand. She knew she would have handled the challenge of whale ship and ocean better than Richard could. It was nonsense to think of any woman in such a situation yet in a world that honoured physical courage but took no account of the inner resolution that was the hallmark of the truly brave, she knew she would have survived better than he could.

  When he came back from the sea six months later he was a stranger.

  Physically he was the same, stronger in his body but otherwise unchanged, but he had become hard-edged, with an emptiness behind his eyes that frightened her; he had learnt to hate the world. She would have hated it with him had he allowed her to, but he shut her out. They were not one being any more; the Southern Ocean had divided them.

  To some extent that would have been inevitable even if he’d never gone away at all. They had both had their thirteenth birthdays; in his case through experience, in hers through physical inevitability, they were children no longer.

  Nevertheless she was determined to win him back.

  It wasn’t easy. They talked but not as they had in the old days. He seemed to have forgotten the life they had shared. She asked him what his life had been like on the whale ship.

  ‘We killed whales,’ he said.

  ‘But I mean what was it like for you?’

  He looked at her with his stranger’s eyes. ‘I told you. We killed whales. That was all we did.’

  Of course it wasn’t. He’d lived too: it was that she wanted him to tell her but he would not. She wanted things to be as they had been; they were not. She wanted her feelings and his to unite as they once had but he prevented that. She watched him do everything he could to keep himself apart.

  There were days when she found herself wishing he had never come back, knowing she did not mean it.

  Alice discovered in herself something she had never thought to find. It was love – not the love she had for her mother or for life; she’d always had that. Her feelings now were entirely different, both more intense and more painful, the love she felt for a man. Richard was scarcely a man, as she was scarcely a woman, but she knew with surprise but also certainty that she loved him, had always loved him without realising it.

  It was a feeling entirely separate from the pity and indignation that she felt at the unfairness of his uncle’s treatment of him. Her mind touched her love wonderingly, as her fingers might have touched a jewel of fabulous worth. Whatever Richard had become, wherever he might be hiding behind the protective shell he had acquired during his time on the whale ship Ariadne, she would find him. She would bring him home.

  She discovered that love and silence were enemies. She found him mooching, head down, in the garden. They had met there often in the old days when he had made a deliberate effort to keep out of his uncle’s way. Now there was a different feeling, a defiance that she knew was directed not at his uncle but at her.

  She was no longer prepared to ke
ep out. She went up to him, standing in the path so he could not get by.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘I am here,’ he said.

  Now or never. She launched herself at him. Her clenched fists hammered his chest.

  ‘You are not! You are somewhere else.’

  His cold eyes inspected her. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘We used to be friends! What did they do to you?’

  She stared at him defiantly. Pleading. For a moment nothing, then his mouth began to work and she saw something happening to him that was horrible yet offering the possibility of relief. His features blurred as the barriers he had erected against the world dissolved. His eyes…

  Tears?

  She was hugging him, soothing him, knowing that the next moments would be crucial. If he thought for a moment she was patronising him…

  She too was in tears and she sensed that this might save the situation, save them both.

  ‘Look at me!’

  Weeping, they stared at each other. And the barriers – at last – were down.

  They found a corner of the grounds behind the potting sheds. They sat on the grass and Richard talked. After being dammed up so long, the words poured out.

  Her fury grew as she listened but she was determined to say nothing until he was finished. He described being stripped naked. Being covered in tar. Being hoisted on a halyard to the mizzen top and left there for hours while the southerly wind drove shards of ice into his skin. He told her about scraping his food off the deck after his tin plate had been upended accidentally on purpose by the cook.

  ‘Did the officers do nothing?’

  ‘They were the worst,’ he said. ‘They put the men up to it.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because he had told them to toughen me up.’

  He.

  ‘That was their way of doing it, I suppose.’

  ‘Didn’t you feel like killing them?’

  ‘All the time.’

  She took his hand in hers. ‘I think you are the bravest man I know.’

  ‘I’m a coward. If I’d been brave I would have done it.’

  ‘No. Because that way they’d have won. You defied them by not killing them.’

  ‘It makes no difference. I could never have managed it anyway.’

  ‘I am glad you didn’t try.’

  Alice’s heart was overflowing. With love; with relief that they were finally together again. She was tempted to say something about that but did not, sensing that the moment was not right to talk to him about her feelings.

  ‘Remember this,’ her mother had told her. ‘Men, especially young uns, are easily scared where us women is concerned.’

  She decided it was a wise saying. She therefore did not allow her feelings to show. She let him think they were friends, no more than that. There was no reason for him to be frightened of a friend. Occasionally, when she was alone, she took out her love and polished it in wonder that she felt as she did, knowing she always would.

  Twice more Richard went back to sea. He never talked about it again but she got the feeling that the terrible traumas of that first voyage were not repeated. He was a man now and other boys took his place. He was never willing to talk about them either or the way their treatment might have mirrored his own and Alice decided it might be safer not to press him on such matters.

  Once again, the years passed.

  1982

  Tamara stared back at Grant. She felt a shortening of her breath, a tightening of the muscles around her heart.

  Is that why you’re here? he had said. To stop this woman and her son from cutting you out?

  Now everything was in play: the future, Derwent, her love for this man, all dependent on the next few minutes.

  She drew her breath deeply into her lungs. She made no attempt to touch him or give any hint of the anguish that hovered so close to her heart.

  ‘I am here because I love you.’ She spoke simply, her heart in every word for him to see, if he were willing. ‘When you went away after your father died I understood why you had to do it, how wounded you’d been by the things that happened to you in Vietnam. I understood yet my heart was breaking. Seeing you at Agfest was like having a light switch on again; I knew then I had never stopped loving you, that nothing else in my life came close to the feelings I had for you. Everything that has happened between us since – everything – has only strengthened that feeling. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone and will go on loving you, I believe, forever.’

  They sat side by side in the ute and stared at each other. So close; so far apart. Now only Grant could bridge the gap.

  She could not tell from his expression what he was feeling.

  ‘Tell me about Derwent,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it means to you.’

  ‘It’s been in my family for a hundred and fifty years,’ she said. ‘It represents all the generations of my ancestors in this country. All the things that have happened to us and to other people.’

  ‘A story of Australia,’ he said.

  ‘One of the stories, anyway.’

  ‘And you want it to be yours but without a man in your life there’s a good chance it won’t be.’

  ‘I feel for Derwent,’ she said. ‘Of course I do. And I feel for you. I have told you that. Not very ladylike of me, but I’ve said it anyway, and it’s the truth. But you mustn’t tie one thing to the other. They are quite separate.’

  Grant did not answer but opened the ute door and got out. She watched through the window as he walked to the point where the land fell steeply into the lower country hundreds of feet below. He stood with his back to her, staring out.

  She wondered whether or not to join him – even such a simple action might make a difference.

  She was conscious of her heart as she got out of the ute and went and stood beside him. She too stared out at the expanse of trees and hills fading into the blue distance.

  ‘I love this island,’ Grant said. ‘I never felt right when I was away from it.’

  ‘It’s something worth loving,’ she said.

  Without taking her eyes off the view she sensed that he had turned his head to look at her.

  ‘If I were to suggest we should maybe get married, do you reckon your dad might change his mind about Derwent?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You don’t catch me like that.’

  But she was fighting a smile as she said it, because now she felt a quiver of what might be hope.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Too hypothetical. You want to ask me, ask, and I’ll give you my answer. But let’s have no more of these maybes and might bes. A girl’s got her pride.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘Take it to the bank,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t look like I got much choice then, does it?’

  He turned to face her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her towards him.

  ‘You’re not asking me to kneel, I hope?’

  ‘We can skip the kneeling,’ she said.

  ‘Tamara Penrose,’ Grant said. ‘I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?’

  You can bet your life on it. Or: What took you so long?

  All the smart and clever answers. But Tamara said none of them. She looked up at him, her face wet with tears, her heart naked in her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes and yes and yes.’

  Yet later practical considerations raised their head.

  ‘What about Ringarooma?’ Tamara said.

  ‘I’ll get a manager in,’ Grant said.

  ‘Maybe I can give you a hand?’

  There was love in Grant’s smile. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  1913

  Jonathan might have dropped off the planet. A week had passed without her seeing him. She was tempted to go to Derwent and seek him out but told herself not to be stupid. Instead she went for a walk and met him, he on horseback, she standing at the roadside.

 
What had happened had not diminished her but made her more stalwart in her self-respect. They had shared something precious – both giving, both receiving – and she spoke to Jonathan as an equal.

  ‘I wondered if you were dead. Or maybe dying. You want me to send for the undertaker? Or will the doctor do?’

  ‘After what happened I wondered whether you would want to see me again,’ he said.

  Heaven help us.

  ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was the most wonderful moment of my life.’

  Not the way a lady would talk but Bec had never pretended to be one of those.

  He dismounted and took her hands in his. ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Every word.’

  Bec marvelled at the plain way she had spoken to him. Well, she had said it. Now it was up to him.

  Jonathan knew that Grandma would be livid when she discovered he had no plans to marry Judith Hargreaves. When she discovered he had chosen Bec Hampton over the daughter of a senior official. Bec Hampton, the daughter of the disreputable Conan Hampton, a former servant without a bean to his name? She would not let that happen without a fight.

  Well, let the game play out as it would.

  He took his horse and rode to Blackman’s Head, to the patch of ground where they had made love. He wanted to relive every moment of that wonderful afternoon, to revisit the emotion that had so meaningfully enriched and changed his life.

  He sat quietly in the shade and was one with all that had happened here. One of the moments he remembered best was not the actual lovemaking but afterwards, when Bec had unwound herself from his arms and, getting up, had picked some wild flowers before coming back and sitting with legs crossed at his feet. She had sat and arranged the flowers in neat piles of yellow and white blossom on the warm ground, her neck bent to watch the quiet movement of her hands, and he had known that in this way, without a word being spoken, she had been laying claim to him and to the future.

  It was lunchtime the following day. From her position at the head of the table Grandma Bessie twinkled at Jonathan.

  ‘Have you made any arrangements about your next visit to the Hargreaves?’