I am Australian, she thought, with conviction. Not German. I am a Fenchurch, and so is he. He will forget he is a New Zealander. We will come to an agreement about how things will be managed between us. Mutually respectful. Close or not so close. Close enough to be able to greet one another with a kiss in the mornings. Those lips just like Matthew’s, the gleaming planes of his beautiful face. Close enough to sit across the table for their evening meal. Close enough to sit together in the belvedere in the evenings, to hear how his voice was like Matthew’s, only different. To hear his laugh. Close enough to take his hand as they came downstairs. To hold him. How it would be to lie with him like this.
Her hand had travelled across her belly, following the line of her groin. Yes, this close, Matthew. This shameful, to be thinking of that young man asleep on the verandah, to be imagining what he could be for me. Within bounds. A kind of contract. A secret arrangement.
She lay awake for hours until there was the merest softening of the dark as the sun began to rise. Here, on the western side of the house, the sky responded with a faint, demure blush.
8.
HELENA WOKE IN THE SMALL ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS, THE room that had been her mother’s until she went away and her own ever since, kept clean and tidy, the way she liked it. She would never consent to sleep in the servants’ quarters, even though Rufina had had the roof fixed before the Depression bit. The rooms were still poor and inconvenient and small, and the only reason Rufina wanted Helena to sleep there was so she could continue with this bloody rubbish swindle she was pulling, pretending that Helena wasn’t family.
‘Didn’t you ever tell Eddie about me in your letters? Do they even know about me?’ Helena had demanded of Nan, because Nan wrote to him now and again, she knew. Nan had feigned bewilderment — or maybe she really was losing her marbles. ‘Did you see the little crippled girl who came with Irving and them?’ Helena had asked, and Nan had told her off for making up unpleasant stories.
‘Little crippled girls! Bats in your belfry. Get on with the spuds.’
When she’d asked Irving the same question he’d looked bewildered, even frightened. Lena had begun to describe the child — the matted hair and strange bandages, the tattered frock, her high lilting laughter — and Irving, who was busy with hammer and nails as he settled into Eddie’s wing had said, rudely, ‘Go away, Lena.’ This morning, looking up at the warping inverse wooden staircase that formed the ceiling, Helena knew that by now Nan would be in the kitchen waiting for her. It was a new thing she did. Waited until Helena got there to start the work: why should I break my back with a big hulking girl like you around to help? You look like you’re more use than you are. Where’s your gumption? If you knew how my legs were killing me — on and on. Sometimes it panned out all right because Helena would persuade her to sit tight at the blackened old cedar table and have a cuppa before they started, and sometimes the old girl softened enough to tell stories of them all when they were growing up, Helena’s half-brothers and sisters. Or there would be a fair or a dance to look forward to, though since Dad died they didn’t go out and about so much.
Rufina did. Went all the way to New Zealand, for Pete’s sake!
Nan could do breakfast herself. Who was there to cook for now, anyway? Jimmy and Joe had gone, ordered off the farm by Rufina because they knew nothing about farming. The older blacker man called Bill was living over at the accommodation with Jellicoe — the one who had wept so piteously until Nan said, ‘He’s only a lad. Have some mercy, Mrs Fenchurch.’ So Jellicoe had stayed on for no wages, only board and keep over in the accommodation. Yesterday Helena had watched him ride out in the cool of the morning with Albert, grinning from ear to ear, and she thought, My, you’ve landed on your feet, haven’t you, little bottler!
A new pimple had formed on her chin. She lay on her back, pushing at the sore with a fingertip as if to force it into retreat, level with her skin. From previous experience she knew it would only antagonise it, make it worse. A great welling rose in her chest enough to hurt — why wasn’t she beautiful enough for Irving to notice her? And he would notice her if she told him that he was her nephew. He would. Or cousin. She could tell him a version of the truth — not that she was his aunt. He mightn’t like her enough if he knew she was his aunt, and she wanted Irving to like her a lot.
And why had the crippled child disappeared before she’d had time to find out who she was? The day after the men had arrived she’d gone over to the Tyrells to see if she was there, a scenario running through her mind that the child had made some progress on her own, crawling or whatever, and that one of her uncles had cut through the Fenchurch property and found her.
But there was no sign of the little girl and she’d found her grandmother in bed with a stomach bug and lumbago together at the same time, and ordering poor Auntie Bridgie around with basins and towels. Helena hadn’t stayed long. If ever, she thought as she made her way back to Jarulan, if ever I am a lady who gives orders I won’t. I will ask politely. I will not be like Ma or the Roof. I will be kind.
The Roof was kind to Irving. She had bought him a piano to replace the one that had rotted away with damp and termites. She had taken down the decayed curtains, still with threads of gold in the creases, and enlisted Lena’s help to hang new ones of chintz. The carter and his boy had returned with a dinghy-sized leather chesterfield, a clutch of padded armchairs and a roll of Turkish carpet, and Irving had set it all about in the biggest room of the wing. Min’s statues stood there still — though scheduled for removal. ‘Can’t live with them,’ Irving had said, hanging cloths over their heads. The fat man statue with the bunches of grapes he’d turned to face the tall windows that looked out over the raggy rose garden towards the river.
Later, she would go over to the accommodation and ask Bill and Jellicoe about the little girl. Maybe they were keeping her a secret — although there was a strictly no girls or women rule over there. No women, except in the married quarters. They still held to the old rule, so the little girl wouldn’t be there.
And it was a little girl, Helena was sure. Wasn’t it? In the days that had passed since she’d met her, Lena had begun to wonder if she’d imagined it. Her mind kept returning to the little girl, pressing on the memory as if it was a sore, like the one on her chin. There was something about the girl that frightened her.
The dinner bell. Dingdong. She ignored it. Was she the only one who had noticed the child? How could that have been? Or did she belong to the carter perhaps, who had come back in the dark to fetch her?
Perhaps she wasn’t real. A ghost. A real live ghost. One that lived outside, as opposed to the one that hung about inside. Not that anyone had seen the inside ghosts — just heard them. The scraping of little wheels. The whirring, spinning, whistling. The rocking of a chair in the little room across from the master bedroom, where the first Mrs Fenchurch had gone for her turns.
Dingdong.
Ding.
Nan was ringing the dinner bell! At breakfast time! Helena sat bolt upright in bed. She had done it once before and Rufina had been furious; it had put her out of kilter for the whole day, she said; she had struggled to find her balance.
Dong.
The deeper bell again. An emergency, or did the old girl really have a slate loose and thought the evening had come before the morning?
Flying out of bed, Helena tugged down her nightdress and ran as fast as she could barefoot through the shadowy corridors towards the kitchen, the bell tolling all the way, uneven, urgent, offbeat.
9.
RUFINA, MIXING PIGSWILL IN AN OLD IRON BATH KEPT IN THE barn for the purpose, heard the tolling of the dinner bell but gave it no heed. Nance was losing her mind and that was that. The wrong bell at the wrong time of day was just another minor symptom in a growing list. There was nothing to be done about it. With any luck, the decline would be rapid. If only there was a real family to take her back, look after her now she was old. If she had been a real servant then she could have paid he
r off, but she wasn’t, in Rufina’s opinion, the genuine article. Matthew had treated her more like an elderly aunt, a member of the family. When he was alive he had allowed her to eat with them in the evenings, the four of them, Lena as well. She had asked once, when Nance was bedridden with one of her many ailments: have you got a brother or sisters? She knew there had been no children.
The old woman had got weepy, offended, and hands had to be patted and apologies approached.
Oats, windfall apples, kitchen scraps, maize meal, skim milk, slurred and slopping around with an old wooden scythe handle, perfect for the job. Two heavy bucketfuls balanced either side, she walked the full length of the piggery, emptying them into the central channel that acted as a trough. They’d always kept pigs at Jarulan, since before she came. In Matthew’s father’s day they’d kept them for their own use. But this was new, different, modern — intensive farming, a new initiative of her own since Matthew’s death. They did it in Europe, had done for decades, kept pigs in large numbers indoors, but it was only just catching on here, in its own way, with long segmented barns built of corrugated iron with stone floors.
In this snowless climate, the building was open-ended, built east to northeast to take advantage of the prevailing winds.
Even so, you had to have a strong stomach for it. The stench, especially on still mornings like this one, could take the lining off your nostrils and burn your throat.
Rufina carried the bucket down the shed, flanked by the farrowing sows, separate from one another in pens, and on the other side the store pigs and porkers, fattening for the market and doing so nicely. Tamworths — sparse soft white hair, smooth ruddy skins, even-tempered. The best. This time of year you had to worry about flystrike and fungal infections — but so far so good. The pigs made back the money she had invested. Even with things as they were, the English still wanted Australian pork and lots of it.
Back she went to the outhouse to refill the buckets and saw Irving pass by on the stallion she had given him, son of long-dead Boss and a stubborn hefty Waler mare called Tick. An accident — bad boy, Boss — but a good one. You could see the graceful father in the son, and Tick in his broad chest and thick neck. He was weaving his head and lifting his feet, wanting to go out into the day, impatient.
‘Going to check the fence-lines.’ Irving tipped his hat. They had bought it together at the outfitter in Lismore — an Akubra, the latest thing. Felt with a broad brim. Dark green. It looked so well on him.
‘Which ones?’
Irving made a game of it, twirling his finger in various directions until he pointed north.
‘You were only out there last week.’
He winked at her, grinning. She was filled with urgency.
‘Stay here and help me with the pigs. There is a lot for me to teach you about them.’ He could help her with the pigs. They could do the pigs together.
He continued to regard her, the kind warming eyes in the shadow of his green hat, the gleam of his smooth cheek, but then he said, ‘I’m out and about today, Rufina,’ and passed on by. Knocking her knees against the heavy bucket she hurried out after him, calling ‘Irving!’, slopping the feed, just in time to see him jump the first gate, where he kicked the horse on — though it hardly needed any encouragement, rising strong to the gallop almost immediately. She watched him ride out of sight as they took the fences all the way across the fields north of Tyrells’, his blue shirt filling like a sail. So beautiful, the pair of them riding out, the green of the land drawing them in. Above the McPherson Range thunderheads gathered again but they wouldn’t break; no rain for weeks, just heavy, steaming clouds that sat above man and animal like a lid on a simmering pot.
If only he had asked her to ride out with him. But why would he? What had he seen when he’d looked at her — hair scragged back under her hat, sweating in moleskin trousers and man’s shirt and boots, and reeking of the Schweines.
Did she? Her bare arm smelt of nothing, but then one of the shit-caked sows would think she smelt of nothing, if you asked her and she could answer. There was no point in worrying about Irving, about his responses to her. She had to take it all slowly.
Ravenously the sow, due to farrow in the next few days, chewed at the trough, working her big red jaw and slurping and crunching the way she had when she ate the last litter. And the one before that. The trick this time would be to get them away from her as soon as they were born — or put her in a crate so she couldn’t turn around. Cruel but effective. Crates made sense. She’d have some built. Stop them from eating their babies, but also prevent them from looking after them properly, cleaning them and so on, from expending whatever version of love a sow felt. If they felt love. She thought they might. She certainly did, looked forward to the piglets’ arrival.
Leaning against the low gate of the last sow’s stall, she watched three-day-old piglets as they fed in a frenzy, corkscrews whirling, scrambling over one another to change places, as if one teat were preferable to another. There was a rhythm to it, because the sow let down her milk only in short bursts and the infants strove for as much of it as they could swallow in the time allowed. One piglet lay away from the others on the straw, listless, his eyes opening and closing slowly, furrowed brow deepening and twitching, as if the little of the world that he had seen so far disappointed him. She opened the gate and went in, scooped him up and carried him out.
What was the fairy tale about a woman who took a little piglet to be her own child? The enchanted Firkel that turned out to be the lost son of a king? Holding him now, warm and sleepy — sick? — she could see how a childless woman might well fall in love with a piglet. He was not much more than the size of a newborn baby, and he smelt as inoffensive as her arm had done, and he was brightening with her attention, a light coming into his little piggy eyes.
She held him up between her hands — the way mothers do to look into their infants’ faces — and his eyes were oddly boy-like; his whiffling shovel nose and dangling cloven feet less so. The piglet’s expression changed — from one of curiosity and trust to one of fear and suspicion, although was it because he’d only just realised how high in the air she held him? He pooped a tiny dribble down her arm, slimy and brown. From nowhere came a violent, momentary urge to throw him away, as hard as she could, to dash his brains out against the far wall, not because he had shat on her, but because even a small pig looked at her the way everyone else did — Nance, Lena, the hands, the new arrivals. With suspicion. They would protect themselves from her. They were unable to predict what she would do next. A lone wolf. Heartless, sharp, determined, wilful. The widow. A killjoy. Miesmacher. She was not.
But not Irving. He didn’t think that of her, and was that because the shower of gifts — the horse, the furniture for the wing, the piano, new saddlery, boots, spurs and clothes — had blinded him to her true nature? A brand-new rifle. A swag of dogs: a red heeler, two shepherds and a collie.
The piglet was anxious, his ears twitching back and forth and four neat feet working the air. She turned him around so that he could look down on his mother and littermates, and his efforts redoubled, screwy tail wiggling and pink balls bulging small between his legs, buttocks wobbling. His hams. Tamworths are the only pig with bum cheeks, she had been interested to learn. One truly could say pig’s arse and mean it if you spent hours in their company. He was greasy in her hands, distasteful suddenly, so she opened the stall again and went in to lay him among his brothers and sisters, whom she saw now were considerably bigger. The runt then, and likely to miss out on sustenance altogether, unless someone looked after him. Lena?
Bending to the sow, who regarded her warily also, she pulled away the fattest piglet and put the runt in his place and waited until he got started on a meal. After he was well away, she left the pigs to stand for a moment at the open end of the corrugated-iron shed for the best of the view. All was peaceful. The heat was less punishing than it had been, maybe, but it was still enough for the day to burn like a furnace later. In
the grey glare, the air was almost purple. Away in the distance, in the opposite direction to the one Irving had taken, the tractor was towing the new combine harvester in the lucerne. Two men sat side by side on the tractor, and several others followed on foot to gather and bind, since the sheathing function on the damned harvester was playing up again. She would have to take it to the mechanic in Lismore if her own man really proved incapable of fixing it, and if she were to go into town then she could take care of some outstanding bills and visit the bank manager to plead for clemency on the loan that had fixed the belvedere roof, bought the A Model Ford, the harvester, and the new tractor, and the oil generator, and many other expensive improvements made just before the crash.
She hadn’t used to work so hard on the farm, didn’t need to even now in this Depression. Some of it was show since Irving arrived. Wasn’t it? Go on, be honest. But she had to show him she meant business — she wouldn’t hand the farm over to him until she was sure he knew what he was doing with all of it. The barley, wheat, tobacco, beef, poultry, pigs.
So far, Irving had shown no interest in crops. Or the pigs. Anything that didn’t involve riding out, or horses or dogs. But then she hadn’t made herself clear and she could see that she would have to — and it was something she would have to plan to the last detail, in case he took fright.
Inside she washed perfunctorily — it was pointless trying to keep clean in this place really, if you were going to do anything at all but hang about inside bored out of your mind — and went to Matthew’s old desk in the library to begin the accounts. He could have had any room in the house as his study, but it had been here. He had put his desk in Min’s library. To be close to his first wife, Nance had told her, in the days when Rufina would ask her searching questions about the first Mrs Fenchurch.
Jarulan by the River Page 25
