Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  It was a full, slow, bawling hour before they saw, on a bend in the distance, the sentinel stand of Bangalow palms. When they were children, their mother Min would tell them it was a family of mopheaded creatures that came alive after dusk and went about the estate putting the day’s wrongs to rights. She’d told them the story to quieten them on long rides home from Clunes, or Lismore, where she would go in search of company.

  Jean glanced at her other children, intent on the river, saw the delight on their faces. How lush and wet it all was, after the Queensland plantation. There were the Chinese gardens and tobacco fields, the lower beds shored up against the river.

  The riverbank was lowest here, with flooded paddocks spreading beyond. On the next rise was the small stand of remaining red cedar, then the cherry orchards, gardens, and on the next curve Jarulan, the grandest house for hundreds of miles, vast and incongruous as always, home for three generations of Fenchurches and the last generation flown.

  ‘What a pity,’ said Louisa quietly beside her, ‘that Grandfather Fenchurch didn’t decide on Sydney. How much more fun we would all have had, how much better it would have been for Mother.’

  *

  The painter was thrown over the post and the Aboriginal man leapt as nimbly as Llew would have done to the warped boards of Jarulan’s jetty. It was Jean who noticed this small likeness, the long legs and narrow frame, and it was bewildering, unsettling. Since they’d had the news she’d seen Llew everywhere, once sure she had seen him pass her best room window, when it was her own husband, who bore no similarity. Never would she have thought a Black could resemble him but there it was, the same grace, the same light in his eyes, the gentle way he gave her his narrow hand and helped her from the boat. If it wasn’t for the presence of the children she would have sobbed.

  Instead she and the older boys helped the nanny unload the luggage onto the pier, while Louisa and the German maid stood indolently to one side staring up at the house.

  ‘Who will come to help us up?’ Louisa asked plaintively and the maid shrugged, though Jean thought the question was directed more at herself. The place looked abandoned. The Aborigine set off with some of the luggage and the women waited.

  Before them was a wide sweep of long, probably snake-infested grass, which the sisters had only ever seen close-clipped, with trimmed hedges and flowerbeds. Now the hedges were high and impenetrable, waving long tendrils of orange-flowered honeysuckle at the thundery sky. Roses, lilies, strelitzia and geraniums shoved against one another like hooligans, woven through with tall unknown weeds and bright lantana — the refuge and stalking ground of their mother’s menacing peacocks. Only the upper treads of the stone stairs beyond were visible, fringed by classical statuary garlanded by creeper.

  The short dusk was coming on, earlier for the weather and approaching season. Before darkness enclosed them completely someone had to take charge — someone really did — so Louisa barked orders. Her maid and the nanny set off with two of her children, Jean leading the way with the little girls and Tom and Cedric, who very quickly overtook her.

  Watching them disappear into the undergrowth, Louisa realised it was her Sydney conditioning that made her wait. As if someone would steal the luggage! There was no one around. The river was deserted, the nearest houses miles away. Still, it was likely that if a servant came to carry up the luggage — who knew who that would be, since her father had let most of them go — she would need instruction, so wait Louisa would.

  Consternation rose into the still air, a woman’s shriek — a peacock darting out, perhaps, or an echidna or even a water dragon, startling the maid and the nanny. Flying down the steps above the enclosing wilderness, passing between the statues, a young dark-haired woman raced to the bottom and vanished into the greenery. She had on a white apron and an old-fashioned dress to her ankles, but was too far away for Louisa to make out her face. Jean must have sent her on quickly, because the girl was at the jetty in a moment, assuring Louisa that the luggage was to be moved as soon as possible out of the weather — it was starting to rain again — and that they should follow her up to the house to Nan. She had a proprietorial air about her, as if she had come to give Louisa orders, pointing towards the kitchen end of the house. And she called Nance Nan, which was the family name for her. What liberties.

  ‘I know the way, Missie, you don’t need to tell me.’ Exhaustion weighed on her suddenly, the two-day journey from Sydney catching up. Louisa hoped it was going to be worth it, this monument her father had built, her decision to come to see it — despite her early pregnancy — brought about from the infectious excitement in his letter. It was his first invitation since their mother’s death. And then he couldn’t even organise himself to be at the jetty to welcome them! Typical.

  The Irish girl — doubtless one of the Tyrells — led the way through the bush and along a track worn to the bottom of the stairs, where the statue of Aphrodite, with her one exposed breast and proffered apple, was green streaked. Louisa’s mother had chosen her to stand across from Hera, goddess of love and marriage, her stone drapery growing moss and lichen. The next pairings at the fourth step were Hebe on the left, goddess of youth, and Athena, goddess of wisdom. Above them stood armless Venus de Milo, sharing her latitude with Fortuna. Louisa remembered all their names, remembered even the arrival of many of them in their packing cases, shipped all the way from Europe, and greeted by her mother when they rose from their wood shavings as if they were long-lost friends rising from the dead. There were no male identities, only goddesses, all of them, all the way up to the top, where supreme above the Greeks and Romans stood the Virgin Mary, demure in her blue veil, her eyes cast down and hands clasped in prayer. She was Mother’s one act of open rebellion, the effigy sailing from Rome but only after the death of Grandfather Fenchurch.

  ‘You will find your da in good health,’ the servant girl was saying, ‘in case you’re wondering if this is any indication he’s not.’ She waved her hand at the overgrown garden, the paint peeling from the verandah ahead — at Fenchurch’s absence.

  Louisa was not in the habit of engaging in conversation with servants. It was more and more the fashion to treat them as equals, which would likely end in cheek and insubordination. This girl was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. It was only now that Louisa saw that she carried Jean’s weighty carpetbag and a duffel over one shoulder, and that her free hand clasped Cedric, who had fallen far behind the others and was grizzling now from the haul up a steep, slimy ascent and a scrape on his knee. Was the girl possessed of some superhuman strength? In the dying light her cheeks were flushed with blood, her teeth very white, she was scowling — and she had bare feet.

  ‘I see you’ve lost your manners!’ the girl said, as haughtily as if she was one of Louisa’s loftier Sydney friends, a Rose Bay matron chastising a sullen delivery boy.

  Impossible hobble skirt rucked to her knees, jacket buttoned too tightly over her already swollen two-months-pregnant stomach, Louisa climbed the last steps in silence, looking up for an instant into that pale face and experiencing a moment of discomfort, a frisson of fear. It was a face capable of anything. The feeling dissipated as soon as she reached the top, where she handed over little Gordon to the girl, glaring at her, and pressed on, struggling to disguise how out of breath she was. You don’t frighten me, Missy! Across the carriageway she took a fast clip, past the long dry fountain, smoothing her skirt down as she went, around to the front of the house and up the steps to the verandah, where she paused to issue a directive over her shoulder for Cedric and Gordon and the luggage to be taken around to the kitchen to Nan.

  The girl certainly had the look of a Tyrell, peasants gone bad with drink, the neighbouring family of brothers that had waged violent war in the bush on Eddie and Llew. The Fenchurch brothers were usually seriously outnumbered. She would deal with the girl later, explain the formalities required.

  Resting her hand on the heavy knocker of the front door and giving it a gentle shove — it w
as always unlocked — Louisa squared her shoulders and felt herself very much the new breed of independent woman who would travel despite her condition, who would exercise her worldliness in understanding the workings of her father’s grieving mind. Jean had taken some convincing to undertake the voyage, to be persuaded that their father’s invitation should be accepted, despite their pregnancies. ‘We are healthy and strong,’ Louisa had written to her, several times. ‘There’s no earthly reason why we shouldn’t travel now. We will be gone and back within three weeks — it’s nothing.’

  The high-vaulted hall beyond was gloomy, the plaster arches throwing deeper shadows against the varnished walls, curtains pulled, the lamps unlit. At the far end, one of her father’s resurrections flew in the shadowy ceiling, facing the freedom beyond the front door — a wedge-tailed eagle suspended on wires, the span of its wings the width of the hall, eight feet at least. Dusty cobwebs hung in spirals from his claws, and more from his hooked beak, as if he carried them to soften his nest. As a child Jean had been terrified of the bird, avoiding completely that part of the house, but Louisa had always rather liked it. After their father died and the farm was sold and the house broken up, she would make sure it came to her in Sydney. She had just the place for it, in the billiard room.

  Soft lamplight glowed from the open library door. Her father would be there, bent over his accounts, or reading in his leather chair, and she would forgive him his oblivion to their arrival. She would not even mention it, but concentrate on getting a sense of how he was. He had adored Llewellyn. More than any of them. Poor Dad. He would be heartbroken.

  Light step cushioned by thick Turkish carpet, she advanced on his back view, as he sat at his desk. His hair had grown thinner, he had got bonier around his shoulders; his neck seemed vulnerable in an old-man kind of way she hadn’t expected. Nor had she expected the rush of tenderness for him, which so took her by surprise that she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Evie,’ he said, in an odd, hoarse voice — she was sure he said that, ‘Evie’ — and he turned her palm to fill it with kisses.

  6.

  NANCE, FRANTIC IN THE KITCHEN, HAD GIVEN JEAN instructions as to which rooms the family would occupy, though both wondered if they should wait for Louisa who would doubtless have her own ideas. In the end, as the Sydney nanny had her hands full of infants growing fractious and having to be fed and quietened, or with older children running excited in and or out of doors to see the dogs or peacocks or fountain or anything at all in the paradise they found themselves in, it was Louisa’s German maid and Jean who went upstairs to the pile of luggage left on the landing. It was strange to be going step by step up the long flights of stairs with a German, and Jean was anxious that the maid might say something in defence of her country, or even mention the war at all, and that she wouldn’t know what to say in response.

  Silently, they lugged portmanteaux and cases down the long dark passageway, which lightened progressively with the opening of doors onto windowed, dusk-filled rooms. The maid seemed to know which bags belonged to whom and worked quickly and neatly, taking the heavier loads.

  Doubtless Louisa would emerge when it was all done. She hadn’t even come yet to say hello to their darling Nan, being huggermugger with their father, who was in his library and hadn’t come out to greet his other daughter, or his grandchildren.

  ‘I’ve always been Pa’s favourite,’ Louisa was fond of announcing when they all still lived at Jarulan, whenever there had been the slightest evidence that she could be — a few gentle words, a pat on the head, a new pony. It was her way of making herself important to him, a fantasy, since Llew had his heart more than either of them, especially since their mother had died and Eddie sent away.

  At the far end of the west wing, the nursery had been freshened and made ready for the two youngest and the nanny. The other four children were to share the two rooms on either side. Her own children would likely get lost if they got up in the night since they had never before experienced a house of such proportions. She would remind Louisa’s nanny to tell them to stay in their beds.

  When at last it was done, Jean felt dizzy with exhaustion. Perhaps Nan would have a cup of tea ready; she longed to return to the kitchen, to sit with her and have a moment of her company before supper, to hear news of the neighbourhood and the farm, everything that had been going on in the river district. When they reached the top of the stairs the dark-haired kitchen maid in the dirty pinny was coming slowly up with a long, glowing taper to light the gas lamps in their brackets. As soon as the girl noticed them above her she came over all queenly, holding the taper as if it was a sceptre and curtseying deeply, back foot extended into midair above the stairwell. When she rose from her moment of theatre, she smiled so winningly at them and gave a great shout of hoarse laughter, like a kookaburra.

  At the bottom of the stairs the German remarked quietly, ‘Someone’s putting on the dog,’ and the Australian expression sounded so funny in her accent that Jean laughed out loud herself then, and so did Rufina.

  ‘How did you come to this country?’ Jean asked.

  ‘I came out with a lady whose fortunes changed when the war came. She couldn’t keep me. I am very lucky to have found this position. Not many people would have employed me.’

  Did the people who spoke like her look like her too? The people who killed Llew? Was it a particularly German look she had? Jean took in the hair, almost as fair as her father’s had been before the silver came, and the eyes an odd clear grey-blue, like marble; they reminded her for an instant of the blind carved eyes of her mother’s statues. Her mouth was pale and mobile, her profile in the glare of the lamps regal — an odd observation to make about a servant. But there was something strong and calm about her. If she wasn’t Louisa’s maid and German, perhaps Jean would have asked more questions. She was interesting, exotic.

  The library door opened at the far end of the hall and Louisa emerged, trailing their father in her wake. Even at this distance she looked pursy-lipped, as tightly enraged as she would be when they were children and the boys teased her, or if Jean failed to follow her childish orders to the last letter. Why is it we are always angriest with those closest to us, wondered Jean. And did that particular rage belong more to first-borns? Her own husband, hundreds of miles north on the drought-bound plantation, was prone to bitter rage against his long dead father and younger brother who had made his own way in the world and prospered. There had been a fearful row about the expedition to Jarulan, about the cost of taking the children.

  She kissed her father and stepped back to look at him properly. He had a lightness to him that had been quite extinguished after their mother’s death but was perhaps returned. How thin and bent with grief he had been then; now he seemed returned to his full height. What of Llew? How could he seem so recovered when it had only been three months?

  ‘I believe I must congratulate you, as I congratulated your sister,’ her father said, formally.

  How peculiar to have mentioned that first. Jean felt herself blushing with discomfort, felt the world shift sideways into something she didn’t recognise. What about Llew, the clever, busy boy he had been, the sunny spirit, why didn’t they talk about him?

  Their father took the lead, guiding them both — Rufina had vanished quietly away — through to the dining room where Nan, and Jean supposed the Tyrell girl, had laid out a cold supper.

  *

  Throughout the meal Jean had the impression that Louisa was trying to convey a vital piece of information by odd potent looks and cryptic remarks, but just as often it seemed she was trying to hold something back, as if she had a secret that could burst from her at any second. She was uneasy with their father, not at all as festive and high-spirited as Jean had predicted when the visit was first suggested: Louisa would have expected to be the centre of attention. For his part, their father was even more bereft of conversation than she remembered. Without Min to chatter about whatever entered her agile mind, to ask question
s about the children’s development — what a wonderful grandmother she was in her good times — his silence seemed more in evidence.

  Jean volunteered some information about the plantation, how bad the drought had been, how they were struggling, and she could feel Louisa staring, even suppressing a laugh.

  ‘Oh, Jean!’ she said. ‘I know it’s not funny at all — but it is funny, seeing you as a farmer’s wife when all we ever wanted as girls was to live in a city! I had no idea you took such an interest in it all.’

  ‘You should come and see us,’ Jean responded, though it was the last thing she wanted at all really — Louisa dipping her finery in the dust and complaining about the heat and flies.

  ‘Still coming down?’ Their father narrowed his eyes at the row of tall windows behind them, the heavy drapes still open. Jean got up to close them, noticing for the first time a band of river mud clinging to the hem of her skirt and saw that it was still raining, heavier now. The rainy season. Of course it was.

  Her father seemed to be off his food, taking only a mouthful of ham and a bit of salad before he swigged back the last of his scotch and got up to replenish it.

  The girl came through to clear. She scraped the plates at the table, dumping them loudly onto a perilously laden tray.

  ‘Coffee all round then?’ There was a note of impatience as if she had more pressing duties.

  ‘I’ve never heard the like!’ said Louisa, after she’d gone, and their father shrugged as if the girl’s ill manners were no concern. ‘I’ll talk to Nan about her,’ Louisa offered, touching him lightly on the hand. ‘We’ll see if we can do any better. She’s a

  Tyrell, isn’t she? We’ll see if there’s someone else.’

  Jean sat back in her chair and fiddled with her napkin. The meal nearly over and still Llew had not been mentioned. Would she be the brave one, risk raising tears from her sister and ire from her father, since rage was often his way of expressing sadness? After Min died he was furious enough to cut contact with all his children except Llew. Countless letters had flown back and forth between the sisters for the first couple of years, with the same plaintive refrain: ‘Have you heard from our father?’