It was the kind of needling statement, vaguely self-pitying, that he never responded to.
‘I do think that’s a bit stiff, old darling, don’t you? Not a single proper holiday. We were always going to make a trip to Europe together, to Germany to see my mother. And to England, yes, why not? But we never did.’
‘Oh yes, I see,’ said Matthew, sinking deeper, letting the water touch his chin. ‘You mean to rule by division.’
He had returned to their earlier topic, ignoring her in death as he did in life when she put the pressure on. He couldn’t countenance it, that she would demand of him the same things that Min had done: freedom and travel and the money for it. It had come in waves, moments of discontent. To please him she had never acted on it. But she would soon, after the farm was settled, after Irving arrived.
‘What else can I do? The Tyrells are circling. Lena spends all her free time with them.’
‘They are her family, Rufe. You should have made her yours when you had the chance. Evie left you to it. You could have done, could have made her yours, from the time she was little.’
I could never.
She wanted to scream at him — if I could have had my own child she would have been nothing like Evie’s. Lena is dull and slow and you know she is. But at least she isn’t crazy like her mother was.
But she didn’t scream, had never done in real life and so would not now in her fantasy. Or whatever it was. She was being childish.
From the north wing where the men were treated came the distant sound of a torrent impacting against a wall, or flesh, and a muted visceral male groaning — whether in ecstasy or agony Rufina couldn’t tell — an almost sexual distant roar that broke into her daydreaming, so amusing, so ridiculously bestial, that it made her giggle. A bear, waking to the spring, to the Aix-douche. It was musical, lifting and falling, and she wanted to sing suddenly, hadn’t sung for years. And so she did, an entire lieder she had learned at school in England. Goethe’s ‘Fruhzeitiger Fruhling’, all nine interminable verses, searching for the words across the decades and finding to her astonishment that they were still there, mostly.
Then it was quiet and her breath was the only thing disturbing the wafting steam. A corrosion in a pipe snaking above her head dripped a little, hissed and popped.
A moment or two of peace, ending with the realisation that she would have to remain in charge of Jarulan for some time yet. The grandson might not come, and if he did he might not like it. She would have to make him like it.
Young blood from the male line. A true Fenchurch man. That was what was required. Not Jean’s — her sons in line for the father’s struggling plantation, should they want it. And not Louisa’s — Cedric in any case not the least bit interested in farming, although both he and his father tediously and intrusively fascinated by the estate accounts. And certainly not Evie’s daughter, abandoned by her mother to a life of servitude at Jarulan. Matthew’s largesse — unreal expectations founded in his gentle manner with her, pretty dresses, few chores — had ended with his death. If only Evie could see her daughter now — and she hadn’t for years. She hadn’t come back, not even for the funeral. What would she think? Cinderella and the wicked stepmother, when in actual fact the girl was stupid, lumpen and lucky to have a place in the shifting, unsteady world. No one was keeping her at Jarulan. Nineteen and perfectly able to go elsewhere, to make her own way. Or to go to live with her mother in Sydney.
An attendant went along on squeaking rubber soles outside her door. Beyond the cracked frosted window set high in the tiled wall, a bird chuckered, a strangled cry like the whirring of a clockwork device, like that child’s toy the grandchildren used to fight over which somehow had worked itself into her dreams, a recurring nightmare of it leading her through the house, sometimes to Eddie’s wing, sometimes to the belvedere — and Matthew was beside her again in the water, just as pensive. He had come back again almost of his own accord.
Irritating. Surely now that he’d gone she didn’t have to endure his company at his behest. The worst of marriage. The hours you spend together because there’s no one else to take your attention. She would never be one of those widows that put a gloss on it, beatified the dearly departed. In all honesty there were long hours in his company spent agonised with boredom, wishing he’d read a book so that they could at least talk about that, anything other than the day-to-day running of the farm, the hands, the grandchildren, the family. To have a conversation about a painting or a piece of music.
Outside the bird in the tree started up again, this time with less whirrs and clocks and more melody, high and bell-like, a magic sound like a bird from a fairy tale, and she thought she recognised some of the lilt of the song she’d sung earlier, the whole nine verses. A mimic, then. What did the singer look like? She wished she could see more than its dark shape through the mottled window and wondered, if she happened to be travelling with her rifle, and if she happened to be standing outside within easy range, would she take him for the collection? Such exuberance silenced.
‘It’ll be all right, won’t it, darling?’ But he’d gone again, slipped away in the steam just as she’d needed him.
Don’t think ill of the dead if you want to keep them close.
*
More than a week passed in Wellington. Rufina delayed her voyage once and was very lucky to get a ticket on the next ship, since sailings were less frequent — few people had the money for a ticket. Thirteen nights in the second-best hotel the city had to offer, which wasn’t bad at all, but she found the location dull, exhausting the attractions in the first two days — the zoo, the sea, the hills, the birds, the hills, the wind, the sea. And unrelenting cold wind unless you stayed indoors. It was as if, after all the years at Jarulan, she couldn’t bear to be cold anymore — predisposition refused to come to her aid. She wrestled with herself over the cost, but finally went to a department store in a windswept street near the quay and bought a coat and hat, reassuring herself that it wouldn’t be such a waste of money to buy clothes completely unsuited to Jarulan because perhaps now she could make the trip to Europe after the grandson made his appearance — and he would, inevitably, wouldn’t he? She could go back to Germany to see how it was now; she could look for relatives she hardly knew were dead or alive. She could make her first return since her departure as a girl.
The hat and coat were not protection enough against the Antarctic gales; she would have to buy gloves and a muffler and a spencer — far too much of an outlay, so she spent much of her time reading and chatting to other guests in the shabby hotel lounge, doing her best to strip her accent of any lingering Germanic lilt. A man who was on government business, newly appointed to the Meat Board, thought she was a German.
‘I’m Hungarian!’ She conveyed effrontery. ‘I left for Australia when I was a child.’
Virtually a child.
Another conversation with a manufacturer’s wife seemed to be an attempt to enlighten her.
‘Oh, he’s Maori,’ said the manufacturer’s wife. ‘You should have said. They have no idea of time. You could be here for weeks.’
A racial prejudice as dangerous as any about the Germans, but it had brought Rufina back to her epiphany in the Bath House — she would remember it many times in the years that followed — that she would remain in control of the farm for some time yet. She was only thirty-seven; there was ten years’ hard work left in her at least. Twenty. More. She wasn’t a woman exhausted by childbearing or poor diet, she was unencumbered even by a husband, and a husband could drain a woman of her vital energy even if he didn’t want to, even if he had no idea that that was what he was doing.
Irving would come to Jarulan, or he wouldn’t.
‘And they never go anywhere alone, the Maoris,’ said the narrow lips. ‘You’ll find that out soon enough. Either none will come at all or a whole gang of them.’
4.
Jarulan, 1937
ON A PARTICULARLY HOT JANUARY NIGHT, SIX MONTHS AFTER HER return
to Jarulan, Rufina found herself in the belvedere as she did most evenings, trudging up the long flights of stairs from the kitchen where these days she took her meals — so saving Nance the effort of dragging it all down the corridor on the squeaky trolley. It meant she had to sit briefly with Lena and Nance, of whom she would already have had quite enough through the day, but Nance was sixty-five last birthday and plagued by lumbago. And by her veins, purple and red, snaking up her white calves. And by her back from too much heaving and carrying. Rufina could have laid her off any time in the last few years and replaced her with one of the women coming begging to the door but all of them had a man in tow. Or men. She couldn’t be trusting them — and besides, if Matthew had had any deathbed wishes, which his sudden demise had prevented, he would have said, ‘Look after Nan. Look after Helena.’
And so she did, by keeping them on, even though all protocol had been broken since her trip to New Zealand. In her absence they had got into the tiresome habit of talking openly about Evie, a habit they hadn’t left off since her return.
‘I wonder what Evie’s doing tonight,’ Nance would say, sometimes as soon as she sat down.
‘She’ll be going home on the tram,’ Lena would contribute, blood flushing her face because somewhere, deep down, she must have understood that it was poor form to surmise at all, let alone in front of her father’s widow. ‘She’ll be finishing up in the shop, she’ll be closing the shutters.’ Pink-cheeked.
Ludicrous, because no one knew anything at all about where Evie worked other than that some years ago she was at a milliners in William Street not far from Kings Cross. Surely fripperies such as Sydney hat shops had been knocked out of existence by the Depression, and besides, there hadn’t been a letter for nearly a year. They had talked more than once about how the only person who could possibly go and look for Evie was Louisa’s widower, Mr Arkenstall. And in Rufina’s presence they had decided — or rather Nance had — that it wouldn’t be worth asking him. He wouldn’t approve. He’d say no.
‘A letter might come tomorrow,’ Nance said often enough. ‘Don’t you worry about your mother, pet, she’s a tough little nut. She knows how to look after herself.’
Once or twice the girl had announced that she’d go and look for her, take the train down to Sydney for the first time in her life and walk the streets. But the idea seemed to terrify her after only a few seconds’ contemplation and died away almost as soon as it occurred to her.
More often than not, if Nance and the girl didn’t talk about Evie while they ate their tea, they would try to quiz Rufina about Irving and his imminent arrival. She’d told them about him once since her return and regretted it ever since.
‘When did you say he was coming?’ ‘How old is he?’ ‘Does he look like a Maori or does he look like Eddie?’ ‘Where will he live?’ ‘How old is he, again?’ ‘Does he know about farming?’ ‘Is it like Australia over there where he comes from?’ ‘Can he understand English?’ ‘Does he wear normal clothes?’ ‘Have you written to him to see if he’s still coming?’
She hadn’t, and neither had she said a word about the child, Gracie. Gracie! Daily she tried to bring herself to a state of grace about it all, the insane idea. What would she do with a child here? A whim she should never have acted upon. But she was beginning to think that Irving Fenchurch would never come, and that she was worrying needlessly. She would come up with another solution to the problem.
The belvedere offered sanctuary, with her Scotch and cigarettes and the two chairs side by side, his and hers, Matthew’s old cracked leather armchair replaced by two comfortable armchairs soon after their marriage. She let herself take one or the other, usually his, without thinking too much about it, the cushioned seat still holding his shape, the clink of the glass on the old sea chest that served as table — and took in the same view through the same window of the bush rising to the road, the glint of the red glass in the point of the memorial, pretty much the same view they had taken in together on evenings without number.
Although they did have a number. They came to an end.
Smoke rose from a swagman’s camp down by the water, the only thing moving. It was hot and still, birds noisy before sunset. A group of wallabies rested in a clearing not far from the camp, and further along again one of the Tyrell men fished for cod on the muddy bank, his dark head pushed forward from his shoulders. Once or twice, immediately after Matthew’s death, she had gone all the way to St Kevin’s in Bangalow to see if it made any difference, but she and Jesus had parted company too long ago to offer any comfort. He was as elusive to her as the cod would be to the Tyrell fisherman. The cod, it was apparent, was fished out. Gone forever. A victim of progress. Like God.
How modern I am, she thought, with my lack of religion and independent life. When Eddie’s son is settled in here and running the farm I could be even more independent, move away, live on the coast. After my travels. A little house with enough land for a garden and a horse; bathe every day in the sea.
But how she would miss this. The turn of the seasons on the farm, the blooming after the summer rains, the frost of a dry winter. The beauty of the swamp as it is now in February, frothing with white flowering foxtails.
The Tyrell had caught a sprat — a flash of silver flying on the line above the water as he brought it to the bank. Malachy, was it? One of the youngest, the deprivations of his childhood not evident in his square shoulders, his strong brown arms. Watching his small figure from this distance, bending to unhook his fish, she had the idea again of doing a Lady Chatterley. She had read the book, the only person to have done so in a radius of thousands of miles, she could arrogantly assume, because no one would politely mention it even if they had, because it was banned. It came for her last year from the Berlin bookseller she had dealt with in the past: Lady Chatterley’s Liebhaber in a plain wrapper, slipping into the country undetected. She was like the character Connie, just like her, only even more frustrating to have a dead husband than a paralysed one. How would it be to seduce the fisherman, who was throwing the little fish to his basket and baiting his hook? Far rather one of the hands, one of the younger ones. The new man with the red hair. Imagine it. If she were a farmer out here on her own she would have someone. A maid. An Aboriginal girl. Should she do that, pick one of the Blacks, make him take care of her needs?
A truck was coming down the hill road, passing the memorial and moving behind the trees. A dusty truck that was once red, faded pink by the unrelenting sun. A truck Rufina had seen before but never this far out of town. It belonged to the Lismore carter. The plume of dust billowing behind fell away when the road dropped to the river, which could only mean one thing — it had turned in. There was a delay before it was visible again, as if the truck had paused longer than necessary to open and close the gate, as if the occupants had wanted to look at something. The stone lions? Surely not. They were commonplace enough, though not around here. She opened the belvedere window wide to catch the sound of the approaching motor. Under the avenue of trees passed the truck, and emerging from under a tarpaulin rigged up in the back were several men carrying swags. Are the travellers so cheeky now they’ll hire trucks and drive right up to the house?
She leaned out as far as she could to see over the double verandah awnings, and just as the pink snout of the truck snorted its way out of view recognised who it was standing on the flatbed at the back, with how many … seven or eight of his countrymen? Surely not that many — but she didn’t give herself time to count them, whirling away from the window, along the belvedere, through the golden oblongs of western sun on the polished floor, down the narrow stairs and past her own bedroom door, along the hall to round the turn to the upper flight, taking them two at a time to the middle landing before the last stairs. She flew under the looming wedge-tailed eagle and fan-tailed cuckoo coasting in tandem, with their new companion perched inexpertly on a rod beneath him — her own gaudy paradise parrot, the last to be seen in the district for some ten years now — and passe
d the library and morning room and the sheen of a glass case in the trophy room to the front door.
It proved locked. The keys were kept somewhere by Nance — though she was hardly responsible these days. When was the last time it was opened onto the flagstone steps above the circular carriageway, which is where the truck had stopped, and from where she could hear voices and laughter? Years ago. Years and years ago.
Turning, she hastened for Min’s morning room, rarely used by anyone except Nance when she was sulking, and the French windows were never locked, so she fought between the musty curtains and pushed out, running again, hot and breathless, and only slowing her steps when she reached the fountain.
Calm down. What will he think of you? His ancient step-grandmother flustered and girlish, when you are thirty-seven, a widow, a landowner. Composure.
Saint Agatha was the closest figure, carrying her breasts on a plate. The story of Saint Agatha — what was it, again? She forced herself to think about it, to sit for a moment on the low stone wall and catch her breath, to listen to the dribble of water from the clogged pipes.
Think of Saint Agatha of Sicily, whose breasts were tortured for her chastity, who was consoled by Saint Peter but died of her wounds in prison. Far more disgusting than anything D.H. Lawrence could come up with.
She stood now, gathering her dignity. She would find out who these other men were, explain that things being the way they were they couldn’t possibly stay — she only wanted Irving and Grace. Had there been a sign of Gracie on the truck, the little girl she had asked for?
Or rather, wanted to rescue from her drunkard father?
At a steady pace she rounded the corner of the house to the truck. The carter had alighted too, and his boy. Long shadows were cast over the rose garden — scene of that long-ago first uncomfortable embrace with Matthew. Shadowy fingers cast by the hedgerow cypresses covered a group of men looking towards her. Not seven or eight. Only five looking towards her from the shadows. Five was bad enough. One man was much older than the others and the youngest barely out of boyhood. They hadn’t brought the child.
Jarulan by the River Page 22
